Must-Know Modern Homes: The Robie House

Robie House at a Glance
Year built: 1910
Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright
Location: Chicago
Visiting info: Guided and group tours available
Size: 9,000 square feet

Appreciation of the house was almost instant, owing in no small part to Wright himself, who picked up and abandoned his practice (and personal relationships) in Oak Park, just west of Chicago, and trekked to Europe to help assemble the famous Wasmuth Portfolio of his work. His departure helped cement the Robie House as the peak of the Prairie style, and when he returned a year later his architecture took a new course, less stylistically rooted in the previous century. Even though the Robie House looks traditional a century later (partly due to successors copying Wright stylistically), its dramatic cantilevers and horizontal lines, open plan and innovative mechanical systems looked forward to new avenues of domesticity.

Wright’s client, the engineer and bicycle manufacturer Frederick C. Robie, was not yet 30 years old when he commissioned Wright to design him a house. Before he found Wright, other architects actually responded to his list of have-nots — wooden house, cramped spaces — with, “You want one of those damn Wright houses.”

In addition to having preferences away from the prevailing traditional designs, Robie was quoted as saying, “I wanted sunlight in my living room before I went to work, and I wanted to be able to look out and down the street to my neighbors without having them invade my privacy.” I’m guessing Robie did not expect such a dramatic and iconic design to result from his wishes.

The Robie House is located on the northeast corner of South Woodlawn Avenue and East 58th Street, on the edge of the University of Chicago campus. Across the street is the school's Graduate School of Business, but when the house was completed, the view was open to the Midway Plaisance Park one block to the south.

Wright exploited the view, and Robie's desire for sunlight and to look at his neighbors, through expansive glass walls facing south. In this straight-on view of the south elevation, the house's three levels can be grasped: Just below street level is the billiard room, playroom and garage (out of frame to the right); the raised first level is where the living and dining rooms, kitchen and servants' quarters are located; the smaller third floor with bedrooms caps the building.

On the left side of the third floor is the chimney, one of the most important elements in Wright's residential architecture, Prairie and later. As we'll see, the hearth on the first two floors serves to break up the expansive open plans.

One way of determining if a Prairie-style house is designed by Wright or somebody else is to ask, "Where is the front door?" If the answer is, "Right there," it's designed by somebody else, because Wright tended to hide the entries from passersby. This is even more pronounced at the Robie House, where the entry is located on the north side of the house, under the large overhanging western eave seen here.

The south side's planters and low brick wall maintain privacy along the long sidewalk, but Wright put the entrance on the north to also take advantage of the cooling aspects of the roof. Writer and critic Reyner Banham applauded this, saying, "It provides a cool-air tank that works so efficiently, even on still thundery days of high humidity."

Even with a straightforward view of the west facade, the entrance is difficult to determine (it's to the left of the bowed windows under the roof). The brick wall is higher here than on the south side, giving a stronger sense of privacy and security, even as the path to the entrance is a few feet away.

In these photos from Wright's Wasmuth Portfolio, systems old and new are highlighted: the hearth (a view of the third floor, I believe), and the perimeter lighting and wood grilles in the living room ceiling on the right. The latter is of particular interest, because of the way they work together and with the rest of the house (they follow the rhythm of the windows), and the way their ornamentation deflects the mechanical ingenuity in place.

The integral lighting happened not only with the globes but also above the wood grilles. They provided a dappled light at the edge of the room. But the cavity above the grilles also served to help ventilate the space in the warm months and draw out the humidity from the equally well-integrated radiators in the cold months.

So, is the step in the ceiling simply to accommodate the two types of lighting and the ventilation? No. The main reason for it is the steel beams that allow the large, open spaces and dramatic cantilevers. And herein lies one area in which the Robie House is a trailblazing modern house. While the steel construction may be masked by the stepped ceiling and wood trim, it was known to architects who saw Wright's drawings. The house of steel, concrete and brick pointed forward to new means of residential construction.

Much has been written about the patterns on the glass in Wright's Prairie houses, mainly how they are abstraction of grasses and plants found on prairie landscapes. That certainly comes across in the bowed window on the west side of the living room, but so does the way the vertical thrust of these abstractions is balanced by the diagonals, as if the latter were stretched horizontally, reinforcing the prevailing geometries of the house (horizontal lines and low slopes).

This close-up of the globe light with square frame illustrates how Wright straddled 19th-century notions of design (particularly apparent in all that wood trim around the light) and 20th-century moderniziation (hardwired lighting). It's also interesting to look at this fixture relative to a lamp from Greene & Greene's Gamble House; Wright's fixture appears rather crude in comparison.

Even close to 50 years after the home's completion, House and Home magazine stated (in 1957), "The house introduced so many concepts in planning and construction that its full influence cannot be measured accurately for many years to come. Without this house, much of modern architecture as we know it today, might not exist."

Contrast this statement with Philip Johnson's insult that Wright was "the greatest architect of the 19th century" and his leaving Wright out of the 1932 International Style exhibition at MoMA. Wright's modern architecture was not the same as what came to be called modernism in the ensuing decades after the Robie House.

House and Home's exalted praise of the Robie House came the year its owner, the Chicago Theological Seminary, threatened to demolish the house to make way for a dormitory. (Robie and his wife lived in the house for a short time and then sold it to another family, who lived in the house and subsequently sold it to the seminary in 1926.) Wright, nearing 90, traveled to Chicago alongside numerous protesters to stop the demolition. Due to a number of factors, the building was saved and has since become an architectural masterpiece open to the public, courtesy of the University of Chicago and the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust, which carefully restored the house in the 21st century.