Willson Center Distinguished Artist Lecture | Nora Wendl

“Almost Nothing”

The Lamar Dodd School of Art has partnered with the UGA Willson Center for Humanities & Arts, along with the Creative Writing Program, the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies, and the UGA Interdisciplinary Modernisms Workshop (UGA ModSquad), to welcome essayist, artist, and associate professor of architecture at the University of New Mexico Nora Wendl for a Willson Center Distinguished Artist Lecture titled “Almost Nothing.” The talk will take place at the Lamar Dodd School of Art in room S151.

“Almost Nothing”

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the architect’s jilted lover, Farnsworth’s legacy is reconsidered in Wendl’s book as the author dives deeply into her unpublished memoirs—and countless official and unofficial collections across North America—searching for primary evidence to overturn this canonical history.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.

Speaker Bio

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. She has exhibited and published widely, and her most recent book, Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth, was shortlisted for the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.