After months of hype, we finally drove to Plano, IL to see the Farnsworth House. I was, in all honesty, not expecting much. It’s a house. In the woods. By a river. But you walk down this path, and gradually the massive swath of green is increasingly interrupted by white lines jutting into and out of your more natural expectations. And yet, the house itself never seems out of place, or foreign from it’s environs.

Somehow, it makes sense. As though, this is the perfect house for this place. Which is particularly weird, you think, because you’ve always imagined Modernism being mankind’s ultimate departure from the wilderness, but here you are, in this house that would not work at all if it wasn’t surrounded by these trees, this river, those flowers. Mies van der Rohe, you realize, was never attempting to separate man from nature, rather, he was desiring to put us back into it.

Here too, is where, “Less is more,” suddenly makes sense, is made real. You get it. And oddly, or maybe not, it’s quite moving. This house makes its’ environment impossible to ignore, you are drawn out into it, always, and it feels quite romantic, which is also something you’d never before attributed to Modernism. Here, you are feeling a little loved and you begin to wonder where you would put all your stuff. What it would be like to wake up in this bed. To sit in this chair (of which there are only a few in the world) and read. To walk to this kitchen and make yourself a sandwich. To throw open this door and feel that breeze, smell those smells. To host BBQ’s…whoa.

You’re way ahead of yourself now, and feeling a little ridiculous. But then you see, that’s the magic of this house. That’s what makes any drive here worth it. It’s not the house you came to see, but yourself in it. The Modernists were genius, you think, and I want to remember this. So, you sadly leave the house, watching it, slowly and over your shoulder, disappear back into the trees (which is what it seemed designed to do from the get), and go and buy yourself a t-shirt, because, you guess, that is as a good way to remember things as any, and you really don’t want to forget this day.