Following his arrival in the United States in 1938, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe founded an architectural practice that he ran in addition to his work at the Armour Institute. In 1945, he met the 42 year old doctor Dr. Edith Farnsworth at a dinner party thrown by mutual friends. The single woman was planning to have a weekend home built in Plano, Illinois. Mies van der Rohe produced several designs for her in the same year, but the doctor's financial situation delayed the start of construction until 1949. Finally, a single-storey unsupported house was built which corresponded with the architect's ideal of a one-room house or pavilion down to the finest detail. Mies van der Rohe had developed this type of structure for the German Pavilion at the International Expo of Barcelona, 1928/1929.
After working with Peter Behrens (1908-1911), Mies van der Rohe's basic principle of "less is more" reached its culmination in this architecture. The only luxury lay in the choice of materials: Mies, whose father was a stonemason, chose Roman travertine panels for the floor of the house, the terraces and the steps.
The disparate notions of the owner and the architect ended, however, in a legal dispute. The main reason for this was that van der Rohe exceeded the planned construction costs. The lawsuit was dismissed and the Farnsworth house is now considered the prototype of all glass buildings and embodies, in the purity of its form, the ideal pavilion.