Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House was designed, in the words of the famous Modernist, to "bring nature, houses, and human beings together into a higher unity." Part of that plan included suspending the Plano, Illinois, residence on a series of steel columns to lift it above floodwaters that occasionally flow from the nearby Fox River. But as this week's storms have shown, floods are getting increasingly more serious as increased suburban development pushes more water into the river.
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