Clare McLaughlin

My thesis interrogates the gendered history of modernism through the personal history of Edith Farnsworth, owner of the Farnsworth House, the renowned modernist work of architecture designed by Mies van der Rohe. In order to demonstrate how modernism serves to repress femininity, I’ve analyzed how the house operated as a gendered architecture of control. This thesis considers Edith’s decorative objects as they existed inside of the home as a method of altering how we understand the home as a work of architecture associated with Mies. By positioning Edith’s objects in opposition to the rigid and inflexible architecture of the home, this thesis reverses the overtold and binary history of one of the most prominent works of modernist architecture in America.