Join us to celebrate Nora Wendl's newest release, Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth, with conversation partner Adrienne Economos Miller!
About the Book:
The iconic Edith Farnsworth House is a singular glass home designed by Mies van der Rohe. But the oft-told history of the house overwrites Farnsworth’s role as Mies’s collaborator and antagonist while falsely portraying her as the architect’s angry ex-lover.
Nora Wendl’s audacious work of creative nonfiction explodes the sex-and-real-estate myth surrounding the Edith Farnsworth House and its two central figures. An eminent physician and woman of letters, Farnsworth left a rich trove of correspondence, memoirs, and photographs that Wendl uses to reconstruct her voice. Farnsworth’s memories and experiences alternate with Wendl’s thoughts on topics like misogyny and professional ambition to fashion a lyrical examination of love, loneliness, beauty, and the search for the divine.
About Nora Wendl:
Nora Wendl is an is an essayist, artist, editor, and associate professor of architecture at the University of New Mexico, where she teaches both theory and studio courses. Steeped in feminist archival practices, Wendl crafts essays, books, installations, photographs, and films that offer new ways of understanding the world around us – the built and unbuilt environments. Wendl’s work has been supported by the Graham Foundation, Santa Fe Art Institute, and National Trust for Historic Preservation, among other institutions. She has exhibited and published widely, and her most recent book, Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth (University of Illinois Press 2025), was shortlisted for the 2022 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. She served as Executive Editor of the Journal of Architectural Education from 2021 – 2024.
About Adrienne Economos Miller:
Adrienne Economos Miller is a builder and educator working with trash, ruins, transfemininity, and other obscene matters. Her writing brings together labor histories, cultural and literary studies, and embodied action in order to explore methods of practice that exist outside of architecture’s historically constructed design/construction binary. She was the 2022–23 Schidlowski Emerging Faculty Fellow at Kent State University with her exhibition “Refuse//Repose.” Her writing has been published in Disc, Log, and Perspecta and her work has been featured in exhibitions at A83, Craft Contemporary, and the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee working on creating collective labor structures and thinking through trans* architectures.
