The Farnsworth House

If you can get past the presenter, who with his sandals, T-shirt, stubble and unctuous gestures looks and sounds like he’s 30 going on 12, (“Right–back to being a grown-up!” Paging Ms. West; paging Dr. Dalrymple) there’s some tremendous video of Mies van der Rohe’s seminal all-glass house, completed in 1951, here:

Mies designed this house before Philip Johnson’s Glass House, but Johnson’s house–built at the height of his “Mies van der Johnson” period–was completed first. But Mies’s plan, with its floating appearance and the patio built ajog from the house proper has much more tension and dynamism than Johnson’s square glass box.

(Incidentally, I needed to scale the video down to fit the blog. For a larger version of the clip, click here.)