Willson Center Distinguished Artist Lecture Nora Wendl: "Almost Nothing"

Co-sponsored by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, the Creative Writing Program, the Institute for Women's and Gender Studies, and the Mod Squad

In this talk, Wendl reveals the twenty-year process she undertook to write her “architectural history as memoir,” Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth (University of Illinois Press, 2025). Almost Nothing takes up the history of Dr. Edith Farnsworth, eminent physician and poetry translator, and the first (and only) single American woman to successfully commission a glass house from modern architect Mies van der Rohe: the Edith Farnsworth House (Plano, Illinois, 1951). Long (erroneously) derided as the architect’s jilted lover, Farnsworth’s legacy is reconsidered in Wendl’s book as the author dives deeply into her unpublished memoirs—and countless official and unofficial collections across North America—searching for primary evidence to overturn this canonical history. Narrated from the author’s perspective as she searches for and writes this new history of women, architecture, and glass, Wendl becomes a co-subject of the book. This talk addresses questions of authorship, embodied methods of writing history, feminism, and genre, and the rich histories of autotheory and autofiction from which the author drew inspiration.

Nora Wendl is an essayist, artist, and associate professor of architecture in the School of Architecture & Planning at the University of New Mexico, where she teaches architecture studios and theory. Wendl’s work—across scales and mediums—offers new forms and frameworks for historicizing the built and unbuilt environments, and her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation, Santa Fe Art Institute, and National Trust for Historic Preservation, among other institutions. Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth, was shortlisted for the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.