The prettiest scrap wood floor in the USA may be southwest of Chicago in Plano, Ill., inside a contemporary round barn built to showcase a massive piece of furniture from the iconic, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe-designed Farnsworth House. When a valuable Mies-designed armoire was damaged in repeated flooding inside the house, which is on the National Trust for Historic Preservation, it was decided the armoire should have its own building—dubbed Barnsworth—on higher ground. The barn's builders, a professor and his students from the nearby Illinois Institute of Technology, consulted with wood flooring expert Michael Dittmer of Michael Dittmer Hardwood Floors and, due to a limited budget, they decided to craft an end-grain floor from 2-by-4s and 4-by-4s left over from the barn's construction. The problem was they ran out of material before they were done installing. "So one of the kids goes, 'I think there's a pile outside the shed that we were going to burn,' and I told him, 'Go get 'em,'" says Dittmer. The burn pile did the trick, and this year Barnsworth, with its pennies-per-square-foot floor supporting a priceless armoire, even earned a Small Projects Award from the American Institute of Architects Chicago.
