In 1908, Frederick Carlton Robie (born 1879) ordered the Robie House to one of the great masters of the modern architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright. It is located in Chicago, United States, this house is the best example of the Prairie Houses planned by Wright and it is one of the most representative buildings of the XX century.

The house he projected, with strong horizontal lines, resembles the big prairies that go round whole Chicago’s landscape. Its big projections, the concern about the details and the use of the materials make the Robie House stood out from the other ones.

In fact, in 1958, the House and Home magazine chose it as the best home of the XX century.

In the decade 1900, Frank Lloyd Wright developed the called his first big stage. This period was characterized by the use of its own architectural language, based mainly on the use of horizontal lines and building plans created from a home image. According to Wright, that horizontality represents the United States’ principles, transferring the prairie to its buildings in a formal manner. That is reflected in the publication of “Wasmuth Portfolio” in 1910 (Berlin), where Wright was deeply concerned about developing a style that reveals democracy and the US nation. Although celebrities like Pevsner and Giedion preferred to interpret all of this in a different way: as a machinist modernity conception, in the end, both looked for the same, a new architectural conception.

The idea of the “Prairie House” was already planned by Wright in February of 1901 when the Ladie’s Home Journal was published.

Frederick Carlton Robie requested Frank Lloyd Wright the construction of his house in 1908. Carlton wanted an innovative house that reflected a huge lightness, without much adornment and a space conception without interruptions. In 1909 the building works had already begun and they were finished by 1910. Wright let Hermann von Holst be in charge of the works, because he travelled to Europe, and settled in Berlin, so he only supervised the first phase. The house was promptly sold for 50,000 dollars of age. The house was sold again in 1912 and in 1926 to the Chicago Theological Seminary.


Interior view. Robie House, 1908-1910. Photography by José Juan Barba.


Exterior view, 18 August 1963. Robie House, 1908-1910. Photography © Cervin Robinson, Courtesy of the Library of Congress of the United States.


In 1941 for the first time, the house wanted to be demolished. Then, in 1927, the Chicago Theological Seminary tried to knock it down again, but on this occasion, Wright himself, who has 90 years old, went to Chicago to protect his work, obtaining the support of different organizations, such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation. William Zeckendorf saved the house by buying it.

The 27th of November of 1963 was named a National Historic Landmark and the 15th of October of 1966 was recorded in the National Register of Historic Places. In 1992, started the negotiations for its restoration and the building works in 2002.

The Robie House’s building plot has 842.49 m² and it is narrow, which is why Wright chose only one axial for the project. The house developed itself into two bodies separated, leaving two big spaces in the plot. One of them, the lumber room, has rooms for domestic service. The other one has the central core of the chimney and the staircases. The pool salon and the amusement room are in the semi-basement. The ground storey has the living room and the dining room and the first storey the bedrooms. The position of the window spaces of both bodies is perfectly adapted to face up to Chicago’s climate: sizzling in summer and extremely cold in winter.

The cubic and flan volumes projected by Wright in a horizontal way make the most noteworthy formal characteristic of the house. This makes the Robie House reach formal liberty nonexistent still in Europe that causing admiration for the pioneer of the Modern Movement.
 

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Architects
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Frank Lloyd Wright.
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Client
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Frederick Carlton Robie.
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Builder
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H. B. Barnard Co.
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Area
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Area.- 1.214 sqm.
Plot area.- 842.90 sqm.
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Dates
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Beginning of the works.- 15th April 1909.
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Location
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Onk Park, Chicago, United States.
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Budget
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58.500 dollars of the age.
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Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin in 1869 and died in Phoenix, Arizona in 1959. He is considered as one of the Modern Movement’s father in architecture and one of the most important architects of the XX Century, together with Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. Wright was placed in Chicago, San Francisco, Spring Green (Wisconsin) and Phoenix (Arizona). His life as an active architect in USA was from 1889 to 1962 and in Japan between 1915 and 1923.

Wright was born in a protestant family. His father was preacher of the unitary church, of which he inherited a romantic view, in continuous searching of the universality and the non-conformism. In 1885 he began to study civil engineering in Wisconsin University and worked as draughtsman for an engineer-constructor. Two years later, in 1887 he placed in Chicago where he worked for Joseph Lyman Silsbee, an architect of picturesque nature. Shorty afterward he became a member of Louis Sullivan’s and Dankmar Adler’s studio, and he was the responsible of it in 1889. In this year he started the construction of his first house, for himself in the Oak Park of Chicago (1889-1890).

With Sullivan he made the Charley’s House in Chicago (1891-1892). But at the same time and independently of his work at Sullivan’s studio, he took part of the construction of the Wainwright Building (1890-1891) and the Schiller Building (1891-1892). In 1893 he broke up with Sullivan and he established on his own account, working as domestic architecture.

In 1901 he began his first great creative phase, the “Prairie Houses” period. In this phase, he made the space a real discipline. His most outstanding works were the Susan Lawrence Dana’s house in Sprinfield ¡1902-1904), Avery Coonley’s house in Riverside (1906-1908) and Frederick C. Robie’s house in Chicago (1906) and the unitary temple of Oak Park (1905-1908). He also built the Larkin Company Administration Building in Buffalo, New York (1902-1906) where he tacked the theme of the work space.

Wirght published in the Architectural Record magazine in 1908, the called 6 organic architecture principles; although he said he had written them in 1894. The principles are: simplicity and elimination of the superfluous; to each client, his life style and his house style; correlation among the nature, topography and architecture; adaptation and integration of the building in his environment and the harmony of the used materials (conventionalization); material expression; and at least, the analogy between the human qualities and the architecture.

In 1909 he decided to travel to Europe and he prepared two synoptic publications with the editor Wasmuth in Berlin. In this phase, Wright has already more than 130 works built. He came back to the United States in 1910. In 1922 he placed in the family lands in Spring Green. Here he planned the called Taliesin House, which would be his house, architecture studio, art gallery and farm. He would extend and modify it during the next years because of two fires in 1914 and in 1925.

Since 1913 he changed his ornamental language due to the European influence and his architecture became more geometric as a consequence, inclusively cubist. This change can be appreciated in the Midway Garden in Chicago (1913-1914) or in the Imperial Hotel of Tokio (1913-1923).

He planned after the Mrs. George Madison Millard’s house “The Miniature” in Pasadena (1923), the John Storer’s house in Hollywood (1923-1924) and the Samuel Freeman’s and Charles Ennis’s houses in Los Ángeles (1923-1924); houses built with reinforced rubblework and walls made of moulding concrete ashlars. But Wright moved to the Arizona desert in 1927, where he found other nature conditions to adapt to. Here he projected a hotel complex in San Marcos, near Chandler, Arizona (1928-1929), which is a growth model that Wright compared with the landscape.

In the 30s, the financial scandals and the consequences of the great depression prevented him to carry out many of his designs and he only projected the Kaufmann Family’s Vacation House: “Fallingwater”, in Bear Run, Pennsylvania; where Wright achieved to unify the nature, the technology and the social organization. In this phase, Wright used the term “Usonians” that referred to the union of the terms USA, utopia and “organic social order”. One example of that is the Herbert Jacops’s House in Madison, Wisconsin (1936-1937). Simultaneously, he built the de Johnson & Company’s headquarters in Racine Wisconsin (1936-1939) and his adjoining tower, where are the investigation laboratories (1943-1950). In 1943, his most important project came: the Art Museum “non objective”, put in charge by Solomon Guggenheim in the 5th Avenue in New York, finished in 1959.

In the 50s, Wright exaggerated increasingly the formal aspect of his buildings. His last projects were: the unitary church of Madison (1945-1951), the synagogue of Beth Sholom in Alkins Park, Pennsylvania (1953-1959), the Annunciation Church in Wautatosa, Wisconsin (1955-1961) and the Martin County’s civic centre in San Rafael, California (1957-1962).

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Published on: December 22, 2015
Cite: "The best example of the Prairie Houses, the Robie House" METALOCUS. Accessed
<http://www.metalocus.es/en/news/best-example-prairie-houses-robie-house> ISSN 1139-6415
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