Robie House

Wright’s Prairie house in Chicago lies low and long, with eaves projecting several metres without visible supports. The rooms flow into one another around a central fireplace. The house is one of the earliest examples of the open plan.

Fredrick C. Robie, a young businessman in the bicycle and motor trade, had Frank Lloyd Wright design his home in the Hyde Park district near the University of Chicago. The house was built in 1909–1910. Wright was then the leader of the Prairie School, an American architecture meant to suit the flat landscape of the Midwest. Robie lived in the house only briefly before he had to sell it for financial reasons.

The house is long and low, with horizontal lines reinforced by long, thin bricks with deep bed joints and pale stone copings. The roofs are shallow and project far, carried by steel beams. The ground floor contains a billiard room and a playroom, and above lie the living and dining rooms in a single long space, separated only by the fireplace. Along the walls run French doors with leaded glass in geometric patterns. Wright also designed furniture, lighting and textiles.

The house was threatened with demolition several times, including in the 1950s, but was saved after protests. It has been restored in stages and is now a museum. Since 2019 the Robie House has been part of the World Heritage Site of Wright’s 20th-century architecture. It influenced European architects when Wright’s work was published in Berlin in 1910 and 1911, and the open plan became one of the founding ideas of modernism.

• Functionalism
• Frank Lloyd Wright