“To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit; it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.”
“The essential function of our profession [design] in our society is to enhance and cultivate communications toward an easier understanding of ideas and complex problems, in the shortest possible time for higher visual and auditory retention of data.”
“For design is about the making of things: things that are memorable and have presence in the world of the mind. It makes demands upon our ability both to consolidate information as knowledge and to deploy it imaginatively to creative purpose in the pursuit of fresh information.”
“To design is to plan and to organize, to order, to relate and to control. In short it embraces all means of opposing disorder and accident. Therefore it signifies a human need and qualifies man’s thinking and doing.”
Plano, IL: Farnsworth House
Visit: Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House is a Mecca for Modernists. We have visited twice, and were fortunate each time to have an almost-private showing, lead by the Center's Director, who is knowledgable and still enthusiastic about this place even after leading hundreds of tours. At the Visitor Center they host a small shop which sells not only books, but a curated collection of dozens of well designed objects.
The have a great information center, which they describe on their website:
"The Sarah J. Hahn Resource Center at the Farnsworth House Visitor Center serves as a repository of information pertaining to the inception, design, construction, restoration, and ongoing preservation of the Mies van der Rohe Farnsworth House. As such, it maintains an archive of the Farnsworth House history and is active in an ongoing research effort. The Sarah J. Hahn Resource Center is open during regular tour hours and is available to visiting guests and qualified researchers." See the websiter for an outline of the Center's inventory of print and multi media items.
Discoveries: Our great tour guide was able to give us some detail on where the Mies archives were. Sources are not only at the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, but Mies' grandson still has some of the family papers, which we believe he does make available to serious scholars. We subsequently discovered that his personal book collection is held by the University of Illinois, Chicago:
"The Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe Collection contains approximately 600 volumes from the architect's personal library. It includes works about art and architecture, science, history, ethics and philosophy, primarily in English and German."