Robie House
Interesting facts
- In July 1963 the Robie House became Chicago's very first National Historic Landmark.
- It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on 15 October 1966, the very day the National Historic Preservation Act came into force.
- The windows hold about 175 art-glass panels arranged in 29 different geometric patterns, all designed by Wright.
- Wright ordered custom thin bricks and had the horizontal joints raked deep while the vertical joints were filled flush, so the walls read as long horizontal lines.
- The roofs are cantilevered out from the core of the house, and the outer walls carry no load; they are effectively curtain walls.
- There is no full cellar: the site was once swampland, and Wright refused to dig deep into the sticky prairie clay.
- A plan to demolish the house in 1941 drew protests from Carl Sandburg, Lewis Mumford and Buckminster Fuller, and was shelved because of the Second World War.
- In 1957 the National Park Service at first declined to help save the house simply because it was not yet fifty years old.
- The Dutch architect J. J. P. Oud published the first article on the house in 1918, and its ideas fed into Mies's Barcelona Pavilion and the Rietveld Schröder House.
- The second owner's son, aged ten, later recalled running laps through the long open space between the living and dining rooms.
Why it is worth it
The Robie House looks as if it had been pressed flat against the Chicago ground: long bands of thin Roman brick, rows of art-glass windows and roofs that shoot out far beyond the walls on steel cantilevers. Completed in 1910 for the manufacturing executive Frederick C. Robie, it is regarded as one of the finest houses Frank Lloyd Wright designed in his Prairie style, and one of the last he produced at his studio in Oak Park before leaving for Europe. Since 2019 it has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site "The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright".
Robie wanted plenty of natural light, uninterrupted living space and a view out without passers-by looking in — and, by his own later account, he was told by builders that what he wanted was "one of those damn Wright houses". Wright answered with two long, offset rectangles. The main living and dining rooms on the second floor form one continuous space around a central chimney, opening onto terraces and balconies at different levels, while the billiard room and playroom sit below and the bedrooms above. Wright designed everything down to the carpets; the interior designer George Mann Niedecken oversaw the furnishings and colours, with Hermann von Holst and Marion Mahony also contributing. Features we now take for granted — picture windows, wide overhanging roofs, an attached garage — spread into American houses partly through this building.
The Robies lived here barely a year before financial and marital troubles forced a sale, and two more families followed before the Chicago Theological Seminary bought it in 1926. The seminary twice planned to demolish it, in 1941 and again in 1957, when the elderly Wright himself came to protest. A public outcry saved it: the developer William Zeckendorf bought the house in 1958 and gave it to the University of Chicago in 1963. It has since been restored and is run as a museum by the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust.
The house stands at the corner of Woodlawn Avenue and 58th Street in Hyde Park, a South Side neighbourhood shaped by the University of Chicago, whose Rockefeller Chapel stands just to the west.
Getting there
The Robie House is in the Hyde Park neighbourhood of Chicago, on the University of Chicago campus. The nearest airport is Chicago Midway International Airport (MDW), about 13 km away.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- Cloud Gate 10.6 km · sculpture
- Chicago Cultural Center 10.7 km · library-building
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From the encyclopaedia
The Frederick C. Robie House is a historic house museum on the University of Chicago campus in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, United States. Designed by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright in the Prairie style, it was completed in 1910. The house was built for the manufacturing executive Frederick Carlton Robie and his family. George Mann Niedecken oversaw the interior design, while associate architects Hermann von Holst and Marion Mahony also assisted with the design. The Robie House, described as one of Wright's best Prairie style buildings, was one of the last structures he designed at his studio in Oak Park, Illinois.
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