Dr. Edith Farnsworth, a Chicago physician, commissioned this weekend house beside the Fox River from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Completed in 1951, it is a single room of glass held between two white steel-framed planes, raised 5 feet 3 inches above the floodplain on eight steel columns.
Inside, a wood-clad core holds the kitchen, bathrooms and fireplace; everything else opens to the landscape. The floors and terrace are travertine. The house's cost led to a famous lawsuit: Mies sued for unpaid fees in 1951, and Farnsworth countersued.
The raised floor has not always been high enough, and floods reached the house in 1954, 1996, 1997 and 2008. The British collector Peter Palumbo owned it from 1972 for about three decades. The National Trust for Historic Preservation acquired it in 2003, and it became a National Historic Landmark in 2006.
Comments