Whereas most house museums are nonprofits run by local preservation groups, Farnsworth House is run as a for-profit business.

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The resulting home, the Farnsworth House, located in Plano, Illinois, is located nearly 55 miles outside of the Windy City.

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The ideal was realized in the 1951 Farnsworth house in Plano, Ill.

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As Philip Johnson designed his glass home, Mies van der Rohe was contemporaneously at work on his glass-walled Farnsworth House, situated outside Chicago.

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Then, in 1996, Palumbo turned Farnsworth House into a museum.

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"Unlike the Farnsworth, where you see columns, we wanted the house to be floating, " said Arup structural engineer Seth Wolfe.

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