Illinois’ indigenous cultural sites like Plano’s Farnsworth House are being erased by climate change, U of I archeologists find [Video]

PLANO, Ill. (WLS) — There’s an urgency among some people to take one last trip to places that could soon be erased by climate change.

In Plano, 60 miles southwest of Chicago, an architectural masterpiece shares the banks of the Fox River with potential sites of our most ancestral inhabitants.

“It was Edith Farnsworth’s country house. And it’s a combination of natural areas, cultural landscape, and agrarian landscape,” said Scott Mehaffey, Executive Director of the Dr. Edith Farnsworth House Historic Site.

Farnsworth commissioned Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, known for his “less is more” principal, to design her country retreat in 1945.

The simple and visually minimalistic structure is in fact a complex masterpiece that’s become a mecca for architects.

“These large panes of glass are the immediate connection to nature,” said Mehaffey.

Mies’s virtually see-through glass and steel house was built on stilts to protect it from flooding.

“It’s in s flood plain …