Almost Nothing Nora Wendl University of Illinois Press $19.95 The Edith Farnsworth House’s story has ad nauseum gone something like this: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe meets Dr. Edith Farnsworth at Georgia Lingafelt and Ruth Lee’s 1945 dinner party in Chicago, and they hit it off. Edith hires Mies to make her a house, Mies employs a young Myron Goldsmith to work out the details, costs skyrocket, Mies sues Edith (at Philip Johnson’s behest), then Edith wins, retires, and moves to Italy. Mies is the misunderstood, tortured protagonist from wartorn Europe and Edith the ungrateful, persnickety American antagonist with family money, an inconvenience to this seemingly perfect crystalline temple. Nora Wendl’s Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth throws a wrench in this easy, sexist narrative we’ve become so accustomed to.  It’s always been assumed Mies and Edith were lovers. But were they, actually? Edith has been punished for this phantom affair and the infamous court case between her and a “genius” architect 17 years her senior. Under oath, Mies dismissed her as his clout chasing, sycophantic client: “I was already famous, and now she is famous throughout the world!” he said. Aside from this new book by Wendl, and earlier works by Alice T. Friedman, Edith hasn’t been given her due as an intellectual aesthete and renowned physician who cured a once-fatal form of kidney disease (nephritis), among other feats, including 100 poems that pose questions about her own sexual orientation few historians have bothered to look at, until now.  Edith Farnsworth and Beth Dunlap circa 1951 (William Dunlap/Courtesy Nora Wendl) “And I became curious about what that might mean,” Wendl wrote in her introduction, “what difference it might make to a building, how we cannot imagine a history of architecture in which men and their erections are not central; how to write a history of architecture in which men and their erections are peripheral, or rather, to see if I can imagine one.” So begins Wendl’s book that is nonfiction and memoir all at once. Reclaiming Edith We just can’t seem to shake Mies, can we? The man has been dead and buried in Graceland Cemetery since 1969. Still, he’s the subject of at least four new titles. In 2019, Ralph Fiennes and Maggie Gyllenhaal were to dramatize Mies and Edith respectively in Farnsworth House, directed by Richard Press. (Elizabeth Debicki subsequently replaced Gyllenhaal, the film still hasn’t come out.) Mies van der Rohe: An Architect in his Time by Dietrich Neumman; The Edith Farnsworth House: Architecture, Preservation, Culture, an anthology by Michelangelo Sabatino with contributions from Hilary Sample, Scott Mehaffey, and Neumann; and Mies in His Own Words, edited by Sabatino and Vittorio Pizzigoni, were all released last year.  In Neumann’s oeuvre, he dedicates 18 pages to the Edith Farnsworth House, which mostly focus on its assembly methods and construction novelty (the plug welds, I-beams, etc). Sabatino’s text interprets the house’s early photography, and explores how Edith was largely omitted from its media representation. Wendl’s Almost Nothing arrives not long after these books, and differs in myriad ways. The University of New Mexico architecture professor offers a captivating, critical “history of architecture, of women, and of glass.” In 2020, Wendl co-curated an exhibition, Edith Farnsworth Reconsidered, with Mehaffey and Robert Kleinschmidt, that showed how Edith originally occupied the house, before it was renovated by its second owner Lord Peter Palumbo. In 2021, the National Register of Historic Places renamed the Farnsworth House the Edith Farnsworth House—many tourists thought Edith was a man or had no idea who she was, Wendl writes. Almost Nothing comes three years after the house’s renaming, nevertheless a project Wendl has dedicated the past decade to. Nora Wendl, Equine in features, circa 2021, C-print on fibre rag paper. (Courtesy Nora Wendl) Installation view of Edith Farnsworth, Reconsidered, by Nora Wendl at Farnsworth House circa 2020 (Courtesy Nora Wendl) Wendl calls Almost Nothing a “love story,” placing it arguably in the same vein as Eva Hagberg’s When Eero Met His Match: Aline Louchheim Saarinen and the Making of an Architect, as both writers insert themselves into the story. Hagberg, whose endorsement appears on Almost Nothing’s back cover, and Wendl foreground two women that, for decades, were backgrounded. Their work recontextualizes two men that, for so many readers, warrant no introduction, but whose personal histories of gender politics are lesser-known. Almost Nothing also bears resemblance to Justin Beal’s Sandfuture in that it too is a work of architectural autofiction. That is to say, Almost Nothing is about Edith and Mies, but it’s also about writing a book about Edith and Mies—it chronicles Wendl’s own experiences as an underpaid, overworked scholar living in cheap Chicago apartments without much institutional support. We read about her trying to get tenure, taking anxiety medication, hanging up on cajoling men who pry into her research, navigating annoying Ivy Leaguers, having panic attacks at stuffy academic conferences, and other pursuits. Wendl paints a picture of her own material conditions in taut sentences: “I am so tired my skin hurts”; “while the bartender backs away, I put my head on the bar, mortified”; and “a man that I slept with years ago emails me to tell me that he’s building a building,” are some of my favorites, which speak to the book’s experimental, first–person form. “I write the check for rent and slide it through the door downstairs,” Wendl announces, “I eat sardines over rice.”  Edith Farnsworth, fourth to the right, with friends in Maine circa 1926 (Mary W. “Molly” Dewson/Courtesy Castine Historical Society) Wendl splices historical and archival research about Edith with snippets of her own life story, mentioned above. Her narrative delves into Edith’s childhood, and her college friends she liked to visit in the Bronx—women who lived alone in housing cooperatives near Van Cortlandt Park and had radical politics. Edith was one of four women accepted into Northwestern University’s medical school in 1934, when there were quotas that determined how many women could enroll. She translated Italian poetry by Albino Pierro and Eugenio Montale into English. Edith kept a rifle in her weekend house after coming across a field of horses “shot dead,” a rather Truman Capote–esque discovery in the country.  The book gives kudos to Friedman, who started the work decades ago to do Edith justice in Women and the Making of the Modern House, a critical feminist genealogy published in 1998. Upon completion, Almost Nothing reminds us that the glass house she commissioned was not Edith’s defining moment, but rather a footnote to a remarkable life. Nevertheless, it was something she paid a hefty price for, financially and psychologically.  A Right to Opacity Almost Nothing is stocked with examples of psychological and physical violence men enact on women, like when Mies told artist Mary Callery, with whom he was having an affair, that she “should stay in the kitchen,” instead of her studio, because “that’s where women should be.” The text goes into how Edith was “tethered to historical record by a man,” much like Denise Scott Brown, as described in the recent anthology about her edited by Frida Grahn. It renders the patronizing ways Edith has been described during tours of her own house: “Everything that woman wrote is a lie,” a tour guide once personally told Wendl in Plano, Illinois. Likewise, Wendl documents her own experiences dealing with chauvinist Mies historians, condescending film directors who think they know best, and predatory male students. The vignettes where men grabbed Wendl’s arms and hands and called her dear made me recoil with disgust. “When asked why I was trying to leave my current teaching position, I said I loved the desert, because I could not say, a former student of mine might want to kill me,” Wendl wrote, using italics to describe her move to the University of New Mexico. Gerard & Kelly, Modern Living, circa 2017. Performance view: Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois, presented by the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, Julia Eichten (Bradley Glanzrock/Courtesy of The Artists, Marian Goodman Gallery, and Ryan Kelly) Almost Nothing’s structure mirrors Edith’s own memoirs, and how, after the notorious lawsuit between her and Mies ended, her journal entries were “no longer chronological, no longer sentences, but begin to occur scattershot across her journals and notebooks.” Edith’s poetry and journaling speaks to her own distress over the home and lawsuit. “If there is a proper way to write this history of a glass house, I don’t want to know,” Wendl said. Compared to other Mies historians like Franz Schulze—who once said Edith was “no beauty” and “equine in feature”—and Edward Windhorst, Wendl’s Almost Nothing offers a captivating, harrowing, and chilling account of patriarchy. Until recently, Edith’s trials and tribulations weren’t taken seriously, reminiscent of how women’s pain is dismissed by doctors at higher rates than men. Almost Nothing shows how gender bias and our own material conditions affect the way architectural history is written. It affirms that glass isn’t just glass, like what Walter Benjamin said (“Glass has no history”), and that a work of architecture cannot be reduced to its methods of assembly.  Most importantly, Almost Nothing affirms Edith’s right to privacy, despite having lived in the country’s most famous glass house: “What I would like to tell her is that she has a right to her opacity,” Wendl wrote. “She has a right to be impossible to decipher.” Almost Nothing is now available for pre-sale purchase and will be released May 20.