Edith curled up, the white terry-cloth robe parting just enough for the architect to forget, for a moment, the dance of details in his mind of steel tube column connecting to steel tube beam. He smiled. The stark contrast of the robe to her body confirmed his decision to paint the steel frame white.
Nature would surround the house, would penetrate the house, would fill the house with brilliant light. The house would stand stark, proud, minimal, naked, expression. Edith would know the seasons and the seasons would know Edith as he knew Edith, exposed, open, transparent in love. The giant Black Maple would cast shadows across the travertine tile and warm wood central closet-bathroom enclosure. There was nothing to stop the play of shadow. The exterior walls were detailed as single-pane, plate-glass walls, floor to ceiling. Minimal, naked, expression.
"No my love, mon cheri, no walls. My architecture is modern. It wears but the thinnest of skins." He drew vertically with his fingernail down the outside light brown of her arm. "A delicious one-half inch is all that will separate your nature from wild nature. My grandest gesture shall be to create less with more. Less is more."
The smoke from his cigar wrapped about her like her dreams of living with the architect. She traced the stubble of his beard as he disappeared, eyes clouding, again, into his religion of precision. He could see the house, completed, in its finished form. She trusted his genius.
When the ink on linen details were completed, Ludwig set the house near a creek that ran through Edith's sixty acres. He floated the precast concrete floor panels six feet off the ground to let the manicured green and flood waters flow, unimpeded. And unimpeded, Ludwig, with Edith, began construction.
"The house is not quite finished," Edith countered. "Why must we have guests visit now? This doctor is tired of patients."
"Because it is Walter and Cobu. I want them to see the structure before the glass is set. They will see the glass does not change it. It remains a perfect expression of love, my Edith, and resolve."
Edith thought back to the evening where she had met Ludwig Mies van de Rohe. Among the round table set with ash trays, glass tumblers and bold proclamations by Gropias and Le Cobusier and others, her architect, Ludwig, stood out. She watched him madly draw in ink on the white linen tablecloth.
Springtime in New York. Several friends had invited Edith to Solomon Guggenheims rented 24 East Fifty-Fourth Street "Non-Objective Painting" review. As a doctor, the logical and organized structure of Minimalism held her attention, clean, slick, industrial precision, the restraint from ornamentation. This is how she dressed, how she wore her jewelry, sparse, wanting, strong but subdued. She especially enjoyed the work of Piet Mondrian and had even met the celebrity while visiting France. Rudolf Bauer, Hilla Rebay, Wassily Kandinsky, the birthing of the new International Style. Its intent paralleled her own social perspective and swept her up into the hope of a cleaner, freer future. Surely, intelligent people everywhere must understand this new distilled beauty.
Ludwig stopped drawing, looked over his pen and ink scratches and settled over Edith. He nodded his large head, slowly, pulled the thick cigar from his lips, blew a cloud over Cobu and smiled.
"Who is she," asked Cobu, glancing back at the tall and slender blonde, hair slashed angularly from the forhead to just under the ear, diamond studs only, reflecting a tight, white turtleneck Casmir.
"I don't know," leaned Ludwig, nodding again before turning back, "but she is my next client." The close circle of friends chuckled.
Edith followed Ludwig around the house, stepping over copper pipes, lengths of cotton covered wire, sawdust and just dust. "They are my friends," insisted Ludwig. "They are in Chicago but for two days and we shall invite them for a light dinner and wine." He smiled again, his charming, perfect, commanding smile. "We'll sweep the place out and voila! Wear white, darling."
 She sat on the cantilevered concrete steps leading from the woods to the terrace. She liked the terrace and the steps the most. Here she felt, at least, uncontained, connected to the land. She twisted her bare feet into the wet thickness of grass as the men walked above, in the house, microscoping the details. She understood the idea of the house, she did. She memorized Ludwig's list, a perfect exercise in control and restraint, the manipulation of space, not by walls but by the music of equally spaced, twin staccato sets of eight thin columns, the base clef, the concrete floor, the treble clef, the roof, flat, a perfect machine for living in. And in a way, the house reminded her of Mondrian's paintings, space gridded with black vertical and horizontal lines, contained space then filled with primary colors. She wished her house had Mondrian's blues and reds and yellows.
The three friends returned and sat at the small, painted steel table, the chairs white, too, sat erect.
"It's all in the details," praised Walter. Cobu nodded, "The devil is in the details, my friends." "No," shot Maria Ludwig Michael Mies, "God is in the Detail."
"Damn the detail!" hurled Edith, unwilling to contain her fear after his friends departed with big, congratulatory hugs. "All this, this house, this, as you swear, 'simple expression', this insane attention, no, addiction to your mighty god of detail is costing me a fortune!" Her feet left damp footprints, bare, in the dust.
"Look", Ludwig pleaded, "you've been here with me the entire time. You insisted in helping manage the construction and the costs. You wanted to be here, with me. You controlled the purse strings. It is not my fault the war drove steel costs higher or the glass or the workmen. Everything costs more and it must be perfect!"
"Mies," she used his name like he used steel and glass and concrete, "This was to be our house. I feel like you're leaving me with it, alone."
Mies blew out another grey cloud of smoke, started down the concrete steps, turned and left her with, "Less is more, mon ami, Less is More." His black shoes didn't see her small bare footprints.
"He put the house next to the creek because he wanted to and I asked him, why not put the house on the hill where the view is grand."
Frank agreed. "It is pure communism. Edith, I know you lean to the new socialism but this is not what America is about." Frank went on, patting her hand like Mies used to. "Why do I distrust and defy such 'internationalism' as I do communism?" "Because both must, by their nature, do this very leveling in the name of civilization." Mr. Wright continued, "They are totalitarian thugs and are not wholesome people. This thing, this machine is not of the Earth. It is not organic."
"This house does not hug." He spoke with the same confidence as Mies. She wondered what it was about men and their damned confidence that so attracted her.
In an interview with House Beautiful, Edith insisted, "Something should be said and done about such architecture as this, or there will be no future for architecture." She looked around at the white lie monument set against the living green. It was all a lie. The house did not invite the outside in. She felt trapped in a bird cage of glass and steel. The magazine quoted her, "Less is More,' is what he last told me. We know that less is not more. It is simply less!"
Mies seemed not bothered by her accusations. "She is but jilted and a woman scorned." "Surely the doctor did not think that this house was designed for family living! My Design, this house, was meant to be pure expression, expression of an idea, an ideal. By reducing architecture to 'almost nothing,' I have created ultimate objectivity and perfect universality. The sheer, machine of it, the unornamented restraint, perfection in detail, embody the highest ideals of this new, utopian International Style."
Every magazine published Mies. Radio and television found him well and busy. Young architects, always digging into the bibles of design, discover another golden calf made of painted steel and glass.
 The creek swelled twice in twenty years, rising twice eighteen inches above the travertine floor. The only wood in the house began to rot. Rust crept through the white attempt to hold nature back. The small box cost a fortune to heat in the winter and in the summer, the sun, unchecked, blasted through the only one-half inch plate glass. The house would not be cooled. And on those rare nights Edith could bring herself to sleep where they had once slept, with the lights even on low, the house was a lantern, attracting all manner of insect and pest.
Edith rarely visited the home. She eventually found someone to buy it and she moved away, home to Europe.
"Oh, he brought the outside in, alright! He shoved the inside, out!" She thought, "My insides, out." "I have no privacy of body or thought or memory." Edith mused, "I thought one might animate a predetermined, classic form like this house with one's own presence. It is what he preached." She continued, "I wanted to do something 'meaningful,' and all I got was this glib, false sophistication." Edith pleaded her case.
And lost.
The courts squashed her complaints. The Judges countered, that Doctor Farnsworth was an obviously an intelligent and well bred woman. She not only approved the plans, but she met the architect often on site during the construction progress and controlled the finances. She could have, at any time, stopped the work.
The courts protected Ludwig Mies van de Rohe and in the end, after everything, Edith wished the architect would simply come back to her and fix everything. He had always seemed able to fix anything.
In April 1953, House Beautiful published a scathing editorial attacking the work of Mies van der Rohe and his friends, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. They questioned the International Style, the style described as a "Threat to the New America," insinuating that Communist ideals lurked behind the design of these "grim" and "barren" buildings, McCarthy the newest architectural critic.
The Farnsworth House was eventually purchased for seven point five million dollars and is now a museum. It has been beautifully restored but requires ongoing and continuous care. Nature forever keeps trying to come inside the house, wanting to possess it.
Where there are no overhangs to shelter, even at night, moon-cast shadows, silver smoke cigar form shadows, a ghost floats by in a terry-cloth robe of white, wet bare footprints in the dust.
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