P&P Live! Alex Beam - Broken Glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece - in conversation with Sebastian Smee

Alex Beam follows The Feud, his acclaimed account of a literary friendship gone bad, with the story of the complicated relationship behind one of the 20th century’s architectural masterpieces, the Farnsworth House. Named after its patron, Edith Farnsworth, a Chicago doctor and researcher, the iconoclastic glass-and steel structure was designed by Mies van der Rohe; drawn together by their shared dream, architect and patron grew close, spending weekends together at the Fox River site. Then a combination of cost overruns, differences about art, and contractual disagreements (inflamed by Frank Lloyd Wright) led to recriminations, regrets, and law suits. When the house was eventually completed in 1951, Farnsworth found it impossible to live there. 

Beam will be joined in conversation by Sebastian Smee, pulitzer prize winning art critic for the Washington Post and author of The Art of Rivalry.