Farnsworth Reconsidered

At the center of Mies’s Farnsworth plan isn’t a place for people at all — instead lie two bathrooms, a galley kitchen, a fireplace, and some built-in cabinets.  By reinterpreting the Farnsworth, distributing the contained volume of the core around the house, an emerging nested spatial configuration allows differentiation at a small scale. While open floor plans dominant hegemonic real estate markets and the collective idea of the home shifts towards hiding the utilities for flat uninterrupted floor grids —  unpacking Mies’s tightly packed Farnsworth core questions these values, producing scrambled, broken, and informal demarcations for corridors and bathrooms, water closets, kitchens.  These new distributed cores can be traveled through or around, and are somewhat exterior and interior; they are places to perform within an interior rather than hidden away. Liberated from Mies’s details, hacked prefabricated cheap materials, sliced quonset shed kits and aggregated unfinished concrete masonry units create a new type of Farnsworth prototype which adds a sidedness to each of the volume due to the how lines of the quonset roofing shape the ceiling and interior. (21.11.12)