Virgil Abloh, Edith Farnsworth, and Midcentury Modernism

On November 29, 2021, one day after it was announced that fashion designer Virgil Abloh, creator of Off-White and artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear collection, had died after a private battle with cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare and aggressive cancer of the blood vessels, a makeshift memorial appeared in the center of S.R. Crown Hall, the home of the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago where Abloh had received a Masters of Architecture degree in 2006. Undoubtedly the product of the IIT College of Architecture’s legendary fabrication shop, the memorial shrouded a plywood rectangle, the kind used by students to display architectural models during critiques, within two planes of black wood, topped with the initials “VA.” Placed in reverence atop the rectangle was a terracotta pot where a copyright symbol had been written in Sharpie marker, along with the word “flowers” within quotation marks—two design elements that Abloh had used widely in his work. Throughout the day, students and faculty placed notes of remembrance on the memorial recognizing his influence, many including Abloh’s signature “X” design.

Earlier that month in downstate Plano, Illinois, the 118th birthday of Dr. Edith Farnsworth was celebrated with a historic rededication to the eponymous glass weekend house that, while holding her last name, never fully recognized her contributions to the iconic home. The Farnsworth House was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was responsible for the design of both S.R. Crown Hall and the development of the IIT College of Architecture into the epicenter of Modernism in the United States. Mies’s legacy as architect loomed so large across history that it dwarfed the role Dr. Farnsworth played as the very reason for the house’s being. The renaming from the “Farnsworth House” to the “Edith Farnsworth House” in 2021 opened a period of exploration into the influence of Dr. Edith Farnsworth as a patron of architecture and a talented medical doctor engaged with artistic and intellectual pursuits, like translating Italian poetry. This recognition moves Dr. Farnsworth’s legacy beyond her historical best (as simply a client of the architect) and her historical worst (as a client of the architect with a romantic fixation who enacts vengeance when she does not get what she wants).

Two books have recently been published that relate to the notion of the influence of both Virgil Abloh and Dr. Edith Farnsworth, with Midcentury Modernism as the connective tissue tethering them to one another. The first, Make it Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh by Robin Givhan, is a biography that tracks the brisk rise of Virgil Abloh. The second, Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth by Nora Wendl, is both memoir and creative nonfiction, narrating the author’s immersive, and very personal, experience researching Dr. Edith Farnsworth.

The subjects of these books occupy separate but related spaces within a zeitgeist that began with, and metastasized around, the mythical status of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and all that he is popularly known to inform and influence. Both books convey that there is allegory in that influence that transcends the physicality of architecture beyond design, education, style types, clients, or architects, revealing that the origin point of an idea is made smaller by the vast network of what it has influenced. Make it Ours and Almost Nothing are about different kinds of influence in architecture; Virgil Abloh was influenced by architecture, while Dr. Edith Farnsworth influenced architecture.

Make it Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh
Robin Givhan
(CROWN, 2025)

Make it Ours is primarily a book about the discipline that made Virgil Abloh widely known—fashion—yet Abloh didn’t have a degree in fashion design; his educational training was in engineering and architecture. Abloh came of age in the 1990s, within an era where the look of youth culture was established by bold, aspirational but accessible streetwear brands, many of which were worn and styled by hip-hop artists. All of these brands, from Nike to Tommy Hilfiger to FUBU and Timberland were available at the mall, as were the products of the artists that wore them, including Wu-Tang Clan, Naughty by Nature, and 2Pac. Born and raised in Rockford, Illinois, Virgil Abloh was the child of Ghanaian immigrants who passed on sewing and tailoring expertise to their son. As a teenager, Abloh skateboarded, played soccer at Boylan Catholic High School and, as author Robin Givhan states, “was a mall kid.” This history is significant as Virgil Abloh frequently pointed to his seventeen-year-old self as an inspiration and aspired to create designs that appealed to young people.

After graduating from high school, Abloh attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering. In 2003 Abloh moved to Chicago to pursue an advanced degree in architecture. As Givhan quotes him in Make it Ours, “Architecture would be my bridge between the rational world of engineering and these emotive forms I was always drawn to.” These emotive forms included deejaying, writing about fashion and culture during the early days of the internet’s rise as tastemaker for a blog called The Brilliance, and altering and designing clothes for himself. It was within the matrix of architecture school at IIT where Abloh honed his design methodologies and processes, and where he learned to both talk about and present his work.

IIT was also where he undoubtedly encountered Mies’s well-worn design aphorisms, such as “God is in the details” and “Less is more.” These phrases have been so overplayed that they often become a contradiction. It is here where you can perhaps see the origins of a signature Abloh design move, phrases that provide ironic commentary on the functionality of a shoe or piece of clothing: boots are emblazoned with “FOR WALKING,” a handbag says “SCULPTURE,” a necktie boldly states “A FORMALITY” in vertical letters. While his career would require Abloh to travel internationally, he would raise a family in Chicago with his wife Shannon and retain Chicago as his home base until his death in 2021.

Under Pyrex Vision, the streetwear label that Virgil Abloh founded in 2012, Abloh altered deadstock pieces from Champion and Polo Ralph Lauren, a form of adaptation and conversion that he carried into Pyrex Vision’s rebrand as Off-White in 2013. For the first Off-White collection, Abloh took inspiration from the Edith Farnsworth House, interpreting the high architecture, yet weekend country house aesthetics into an array of high fashion athletic wear. A collaboration with Braun in 2021 would bring Abloh back to the Edith Farnsworth House to celebrate a stereo wall unit created by the designer.

In a collaboration with Nike in 2017, Abloh reimagined ten familiar Nike silhouettes into Sotheby’s-worthy collector items. Yet it was his appointment as artistic director for the menswear division of Louis Vuitton in 2018 that symbolized a shift in luxury goods and fashion. The new consumer desired coolness and originality, understood the irony of high fashion, and didn’t care if that influence came from an untrained outsider. At Louis Vuitton, Abloh reinterpreted the classic patterns and textures of the French trunk maker, founded in 1854, into collection items that referenced youthful aesthetics and streetwear sensibilities.

Make it Ours takes time to unroll Virgil Abloh’s relationship and collaborations with Kanye West but gives short shrift to the significant synergy Abloh had with other artists. Abloh was influenced by hip-hop and saw its creatives as his peers, which in turn made him influential within hip-hop culture nationwide. The name for Pyrex Vision was inspired by the music of Clipse, a sibling duo from Virginia who rapped about cooking crack cocaine in Pyrex bakeware, a product designed to withstand rapid temperature changes. This shoutout and others were heard by Clipse as well as other artists, who saw a kinship in Abloh’s ethos, outsider status, and the ways in which he integrated high and low fashion. These artists rapped about Off-White sneakers and clothing, and appeared at his runway shows. After attending an Off-White show during Paris Fashion Week in 2020, prolific Buffalo rapper Westside Gunn was inspired to create the album Pray for Paris. Abloh designed the album artwork, an altered version of Caravaggio’s early 1600s painting, David with the Head of Goliath that included diamond chains around David’s neck, inspired by the chains that Westside Gunn wore.

While collaborations with Braun and Ikea brought Virgil Abloh into the realms of home furnishings and designed objects, the only spaces or environments he would design would be for runway shows—yet there were some hints at an unfulfilled (yet ironic) interest in the built environment beyond his use of the Edith Farnsworth House as inspiration. The 2021 Louis Vuitton Fall-Winter collection, one of Abloh’s last, took place on a set inspired by Mies and Lilly Reich’s Barcelona Pavilion, and featured two unusual three-dimensional puffer coats: one covered with depictions of Paris landmarks and another with Chicago landmarks. The coats are comedic but also embedded with an understanding of what is iconic about both places. In the show notes Virgil Abloh wrote, “Mies is my other Michael Jordan.”¹

Make it Ours hovers on Abloh’s life and interest in architecture only briefly, yet Abloh’s career as a fashion designer, entrepreneur, and influencer was also brief, occurring only in the twenty-teens and twenty-twenties, a talent that had yet to fully blossom but will continue to impact fashion, design, music, and perhaps in the future, architecture.

Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth
Nora Wendl
(University of Illinois Press, 2025)

Architecture elevates the role of the architect within itself, creating a ripple effect across how the public at large understands architecture. Architects are often culturally elevated to the status of singular, godlike creators. It is the architect that is responsible for architecture; the architect that should be exalted; the architect that should be known. This culture has created an environment where many critical roles within architecture go unseen. Architecture isn’t just architects. Architecture is critics, historians, stewards, engineers, writers, educators, and more. It is within those critical roles that we come to appreciate architecture, to understand it, to care for it, and for it to exist. Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth is a book that promotes two of those roles, studies them deeply, and promulgates the culture, individuals, and institutions that work to obfuscate these roles.

The first role is that of the client, which is the book’s subject, Dr. Edith Farnsworth. The second role is that of the historian, which is its author, Nora Wendl. Wendl states very deliberately at the beginning of Almost Nothing that the book is a memoir, and that much of the history is both “hers (Edith Farnsworth) and mine.” Wendl is a central character in Almost Nothing, immersing herself in the research in a way that is sincere in its curiosity and obsession. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a name so famous and colossal and hitched to the Farnsworth House, is mostly presented as “the architect.” Wendl chooses to use this general term because she is curious about “how to write a history of architecture in which men and their erections are peripheral, or rather, to see if I can imagine one.”

The way in which Wendl works towards this is to fall into the space around Edith Farnsworth, and to join her orbit. Born in Chicago in 1903 to a well-established family in the paper and lumber industries, Farnsworth studied literature and composition at the University of Chicago and violin at the American Conservatory of Music in Italy before earning a medical degree in 1938 at the age of 35. She would become an associate professor of medicine at Chicago’s Passavant Hospital, specializing in diseases of the kidney, during a time when few women were in the workforce, and even fewer were doctors. Farnsworth wrote original poetry and translated the poetry of others. She had intellectual relationships with both men and women, some of which had queer undertones during a time when it was dangerous and illegal to be openly queer. She spent the last decade of her life living in a villa near Florence, Italy, writing her memoirs. She died in 1977 after a brief illness. Yet historically, Farnsworth is not known as a women of multitudes; she is the unmarried, childless woman that commissioned a house from a master architect and through this process they become romantically involved. As the house is built, their relationship sours, and Farnsworth retaliates against Mies van der Rohe in a court of law.

Wendl explores each of these iterations of Farnsworth’s life in an orbit of her own; in Chicago, in Plano, and in Florence, while she navigates the process to get tenure as a professor of architecture after an existence of “beginning lives and throwing them away.” This notion is frightening but real, and renders unrolling the value and narrative of Farnsworth’s life as a kind of kindred mission to prove their worthiness. By getting tenure, Wendl will have the ability to settle in one place, pay off student loans, and cease moving cross country in pursuit of jobs in architectural academia. The reader roots for her to achieve this, to receive some sort of reprieve from both this transient career trajectory and a constant barrage of experiences where men and erections become central to the history.

To be a woman and to embark on the study of architectural history demands you to know both everything about the subject and everyone who has embarked on the telling of that history across time. It demands that you read all the articles, books, theories, dates, and names associated with a topic and that you cite them perfectly. It demands that you give reverence to every scholar that has come to study that topic. The scholars are mostly men, who may not bother to learn your name. It demands that you remain agreeable and friendly when you are provided with information that you already know, or information that is incorrect. Wendl devotes research towards the “words and ideas of historians and authorities of the past,” many of which fail to get even the “most basic of facts correct: the fact that he sued her first, trying to extract more money from her for fees that they’d never agreed to (he wanted to be paid for his work as an architect and as a general contractor, having hired himself to subcontract out the work), the fact that she countersued him because the costs for the house had spiraled out of control, the price for the structure an always moving target.”

Wendl dutifully engages with historians, elderly architects, “old men who worked with the architect as a young man,” and “the architect’s grandson, another elderly architect,” and the results are infuriating. A fellow scholar, aware of her work and her presence in the audience at a talk he is giving, proclaims that he is the only scholar researching Farnsworth. Later, this same scholar asks if they can “compare notes,” and promises to reference her in a footnote if she helps him. When Wendl is given access to the transcript of the trial van der Rohe vs. Farnsworth she is asked to agree that the architect was the victim, and to provide the contact information for her attorney. “I don’t have an attorney, I’m just a professor. They ask for a superior. My department chair? They seem to be trying to find someone who might be in charge of my behavior, who can hold me accountable and punish me.” At a conference, she is asked if Mies van der Rohe is a “sex freak.” Would a male scholar be asked these questions?

Almost Nothing crescendos with an exhibit that Nora Wendl curates at the Edith Farnsworth House, furnishing the house in a manner that expresses the kind of uncurated human habitation that would have occurred when Farnsworth lived there. In this exhibition, shelves are crammed with books, a daybed is plush and inviting with pillows and a blanket, and potted plants are flourishing throughout. Presented on the 70th anniversary of the groundbreaking of the house, Edith Farnsworth, Reconsidered contextualized the house within the life and ambitions of Dr. Edith Farnsworth in a way that sits counter to the way in which the Edith Farnsworth House typically appears to visitors; as a house museum outfitted with minimal furniture, all of which is in the Miesian Modern style. In the book, Wendl describes this as an event without resolve, “something violent is lost in the re-creation, something violent in that her words do not live here, nor does her voice.” Memoirs do not require resolve, yet Wendl comes close as she travels from Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she is teaching and living, to Omaha, Nebraska, to visit family after the death of her great-aunt, acquiring both a vintage pony fur coat and the realization that “I am always casting backward, trying to reclaim the strange women that I am descended from.” While this sentiment is not identified to be about Farnsworth, by this point their lives run so parallel that it feels like she is, in a way, a descendant of Farnsworth.

Almost Nothing is a book that reads in much the same way that a work of architecture like the Edith Farnsworth House is experienced in person. You encounter no footnotes or dates of significance; you must take in the book in the same way that your eyes take in the white painted steel of the frame and the glass, both containing many layers and histories to be experienced all at once.