Robie House

With its dramatic cantilevered roofs sweeping low over ribbons of art glass windows, Robie House announced a fully American architecture, breaking decisively from European tradition to celebrate the flat horizontal lines of the Midwestern prairie. Frank Lloyd Wright considered it the purest expression of his Prairie School philosophy, and architectural historians regard it as one of the most influential buildings of the 20th century, a direct ancestor of modernist residential design worldwide.

Bicycle and motorcycle manufacturer Frederick C. Robie commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright in 1908 to design a modern home for his young family in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, near the University of Chicago. Wright, already refining his Prairie School ideas over the previous decade, used the commission to push the style to its most complete realization, integrating structure, furnishings, and site into a single unified design.

Completed in 1910, the house's long, low profile, dramatic overhanging eaves, and open interconnected living spaces rejected the boxy Victorian houses of the era in favor of horizontal lines meant to echo the flat prairie landscape. Wright designed nearly every element himself, from the leaded art-glass windows to built-in furniture, achieving the 'total work of art' ideal central to his philosophy. Robie, however, lived in the house for only about a year before financial troubles forced its sale.

The house passed through several owners and was twice threatened with demolition, in the 1940s and again in the 1950s, both times saved by preservation campaigns that included direct appeals by Wright himself, then in his eighties. The University of Chicago eventually acquired the property, and after decades of use for university offices, a major restoration beginning in 2002 returned Robie House to its original 1910 appearance. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1963 and is now a museum operated by the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust.