“Glass has no history.” Walter Benjamin wrote this about Paul Scheerbart’s fantastical treatise on the material that betrays no traces. Transparent and honest, it is “a cold and sober material into the bargain”. It’s the ideal object with which to imagine a break from tradition and, hence, one for modern architecture to champion. The paragons of this new architecture—informed by the materials of industry and function alone—were part of an established architectural canon, based on the subjectivities of their male instigators. In her new book, Nora Wendl, associate professor of architecture at the University of New Mexico, hopes to redress this history.

“I became curious about what that might mean…how to write a history of architecture in which men and their erections are peripheral, or rather, to see if I can imagine one,” she writes in Almost Nothing, her almost manifesto for revealing what has so far been obscured from historiography: alternate subjectivities, based (not solely) on canonical representations of buildings. The book—part memoir, part myth and wholly rigorous academic and archival research—is Wendl’s venture into ‘reclaiming Edith Farnsworth’ as the subtitle suggests. Seemingly, Edith is a woman who has made herself wilfully obscure; a streak of light against a glassy photograph; a figure who might or might not be Edith. The infamous client of the conversely famous glass house in Plano, Illinois—meant to be the harbinger of a graceful, heroic modernism to the United States—Edith is condemned to be remembered as the difficult patron, the woman who stood in the way of ‘genius’.

Almost everyone mildly interested in the history of modern architecture is familiar with this version of the story: Edith is enraptured by the architect who fled Nazi Germany. She invites him to design her house. He accepts, and the two develop a liking for each other. They start an affair. All of it, allegedly. This rumour was conjured up by the first biographer of the architect, Franz Schulze, who went with what he believed would make a good story: “Every writer needs a story,” he even admits to Wendl in an encounter she recounts in the book. When things turned sour, Edith sued the architect, or they sued each other, so it goes. The truth is far murkier, as Wendl tells us. It was, in fact, the architect who sued Edith first, asking for money for services rendered. This was on top of charging her an exorbitant $70,000 for the residential design’s construction.

Moving beyond the scandal of the trial and the misconstruction of a failed romance, Wendl’s book offers “the history of a woman and her glass house.” Her own voice and life intertwine with Edith’s in the story, as she continues, “[The history] is both of ours; it is hers and mine—a history of architecture, of women and of glass.” Wendl’s poetic musings on glass in the text are especially evocative. A material that offers hypervisibility and at the same time obscurity; that shuts the world out, or from the outside, shuts you in; all it is is a mere two whispers of lines on paper. Does glass truly achieve invisibility or transparency? Does it offer a clear connection to the outside world? Perhaps. But if you stand too close, it only reflects the world back. And from within? All you see is your own reflection.

An approximation of domesticity encased in glass and steel, the Farnsworth House, is a mythic object. Raised on stilts to counter flooding from the river, the private residence, with its completely open plan, is meant to be a ‘pure’ work of architecture – as minimal as possible, without betraying the desire for inhabitation. Almost. It was meant, after all, for a single woman, meaning programmatic demands were pretty down the hierarchy of needs for the modernist. The construction of the house especially suffered from this insistence on a pure ideology. The roof leaked, and it flooded the same year Edith moved in. But, the architect—Mies van der Rohe, if you hadn’t already guessed—was dubbed a genius. Eventually, the occupant of the glass house turned against the architect and his now popular mies-takes in this regard.

This Miesian virtuosity is definitively evident in his buildings; stoic, like him, embodying his tenets. Wendl’s emphasis on Mies’ silence brings to mind another seemingly silent hero of modernism in America, Marcel Breuer, and his caricature in The Brutalist (2024). The film follows the ‘visionary architect’, László Tóth, following his arrival in America after fleeing from Hungary. Surprisingly, this story too includes a bitter trial; perhaps all clients are indeed jealous of their ‘genius’ counterparts. While many critics have lambasted the film for its erroneous portrayal of architectural history (particularly of Brutalism), how Brady Corbet decides to portray Tóth is significant to this story. Tóth is a ‘genius’ who will liberate the staid nature of American architecture with his revolutionary ideas about how space ought to be conceived—that space ought to be ‘pure’, sculpted from light. Corbet’s story is ample proof that every other male figure in architectural history is identical in some way. Their stories have, after all, been constructed by historians who have attributed the revolutionary ideas of modernity to sole authors, hence suggesting that even the authorship for the built environment ought to be attributed to men, singularly. It is far simpler to trace the lives of these relatively silent men in official documents and preserved archives.

During the van der Rohe vs. Farnsworth trial in which Mies did his best to wrest control over his legacy from Edith’s hands, he accused her of being a megalomaniac, exclaiming, "I was already famous and she is now famous throughout the world!" A significant question arises, a rejoinder to the case itself. Could the house exist without Edith? What came first, the suggestion of a new domestic space created through an oppressive openness, or Edith's insistence on a room of her own? One could argue that Mies, modernist architect extraordinaire and champion of the International Style, would eventually have succeeded in bringing the dictums of European modernity to America. He almost did with the Resor House in Wyoming (a design that was never built owing to cost overruns). What he needed was not merely a client, but a patron who would believe in the ideals he did, who would see the house as living beyond his own myth, who would, perhaps, make him immortal.

It was only in 2021 that the glass house was officially renamed the Edith Farnsworth House. Rather than allude simply to Edith’s patrilineal roots through her last name—suggestive also of her wealth and legacy—the addition of her first name restores some of Edith’s agency to the place she inhabited. There have been speculations, particularly from architectural historian Alice T Friedman, who questions why Edith didn’t say anything about cost overruns or the transparency of glass before the house was completed. Edith perhaps underestimated this. In Wendl’s reading, transparency becomes an imposed exposure for the resident, denying Edith the privacy of interior life, domestic space or even embodiment.

It is unbearably true; it has been for centuries in cultural history: Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at, John Berger reminds us of this. When women’s deeds are erased from history, it is often attributed to the unfortunate (but perhaps deliberate) absence of their archives. And yet, Edith was a woman of letters, a renowned physician who discovered the cure for a once-fatal kidney disease, Nephritis. She left behind a rich trail of writing—letters, memoirs, translations of Italian poetry in English and her own poems—that have never before been considered by those writing about a particular moment in architectural history. Why should architectural historians care about the poetry of someone who only commissioned a famous house?

Focusing on Edith’s lived experience of the residential architecture underscores her persistence in turning what was transparent opaque through images, and revealing the violence of what was meant to be serene through poetry – the experience of a flawed yet perfect house. Edith frequently wrote about the horrors and beauty of the natural world—“I woke/ to hear some flying creature strike the pane/ Of glass beside my bed--strike and flutter/ For a moment, strike and beat”—from which she was separated by a thin sheet of glass. In this, Wendl resists the fictionalisation of Edith.

There’s an inherent loneliness in the book. Apart from the seclusion Edith sought, there is the loneliness of Wendl herself, who has spent over a decade sifting through archives, letters, poems and legal documents, tracing Edith’s presence in fragments. At one point, an artistic project by Wendl clearly demonstrates the obscuring of the lives of Edith and Wendl. She gets a projector from which an almost life-sized image of the glasshouse is created on her room’s wall. The intention of the book and, more specifically, the reconstruction of this history, is exactly this – a recognition that our struggles are intertwined and that they persist.

Often, women’s stories are dismissed, judged as too sentimental, too full of emotion, inappropriate for the rationalism of history. This logic could similarly be read in how complaints are negated, as in the case studies in Sara Ahmed’s book Complaint! (2021) that studies ‘complaint as counter-institutional work’. She writes, “To be heard as complaining is not to be heard. To hear someone as complaining is an effective way of dismissing someone.” Edith’s complaints are dismissed because she is seen as hysterical. Wendl’s own experience of researching Edith’s life, interspersed and mirroring each other, speaks to this as well. Wendl tells us how her work is frequently dismissed and her research questioned. Men approach her, offering their perspectives on something that is not theirs to claim.

Her experiences attending conferences and being called ‘dear’ is particularly squirmish-inducing, a reminder of the systemic misogyny still prevalent in architectural historiography and its academic circles. What is perhaps most unsettling is Wendl’s description of an alleged sexual misconduct episode leveraged against her by a student. His complaint (albeit unrealistic) is believed, and she left after the reported findings on the case determined she was innocent. If both Wendl and Edith’s experiences have been and are touted to be dismissed from the annals of history, the question becomes, is it the building of an edifice that is meant to be canon, or is it its representation? Does this work of ‘building’ make room for women?

Wendl herself suggests there can be no ending to this story. Her narrative ends with curating an exhibition at the Edith Farnsworth House in 2020. The showcase recreates how Edith originally inhabited her house, the ‘monument to Mies’. “Home is so sad. It stays as it was left / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go/ As if to win them back”, Philip Larkin wrote. The exhibition acts as an extension of the book’s project: an attempt at making visible the traces of Edith’s presence in the house before it was altered by the second owner, a Mies fanboy, who stuffed it with the architect’s colossally minimal pieces of furniture. “Instead, bereft/Of anyone to please, it withers so/Having no heart to put aside the theft/And turn again to what it started as/A joyous shot at how things ought to be,” to resort to Larkin’s melancholic image.

What’s perhaps most admirable about Wendl’s research is the attempt at writing an affective history – one that considers the subject of history as having agency in its telling. It asks what other ways there are of constructing an archival narrative. Can we write history from a place of emotion, a place that centres other subjectivities? Can the obscuring of subject and narrator that Wendl attempts in her text tell us something of how issues of misogyny, misrepresentation and subjectivity continue to be reflected in our own lives? The story, after all, depends on who is doing the telling. This story, then, is not about the house, or the woman, or even the architect. Glass is the enemy of possession, as Benjamin counters, if it were to veer to the glass house.