The Robie House was one of the last houses Wright designed in his Oak Park, Illinois home and studio and also one of the last of his Prairie School houses. According to the Historical American Buildings Survey, the city of Chicago’s Commission on Chicago Architectural Landmarks stated: “The bold interplay of horizontal planes about the chimney mass, and the structurally expressive piers and windows, established a new form of domestic design.” Because the house’s components are so well designed and coordinated, it is considered to be a quintessential example of Wright’s Prairie School architecture and the “measuring stick” against which all other Prairie School buildings are compared.
The Robie House is one of the best known examples of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie style of architecture. The term was coined by architectural critics and historians (not by Wright) who noticed how the buildings and their various components owed their design influence to the landscape and plant life of the midwest prairie of the United States. Typical of Wright’s Prairie houses, he designed not only the house, but all of the interiors, the windows, lighting, rugs, furniture and textiles. As Wright wrote in 1910, “it is quite impossible to consider the building one thing and its furnishings another. … They are all mere structural details of its character and completeness.” Every element Wright designed is meant to be thought of as part of the larger artistic idea of the house.
The house and the Robie name were immortalized in Ernst Wasmuth’s famous 1910 publication “Ausgefuhrte Bauten und Entwurfe von Frank Lloyd Wright” (a.k.a. “The Wasmuth Portfolio”). This publication featured most of Wright’s designs, including those unbuilt, during his Oak Park years and brought them to the attention of European architects of 1920s, especially students of the Bauhaus school in Germany and the De Stijl school in Holland. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe among other great 20th Century architects, claimed Wright was a major influence on their careers.
The architectural significance of the Robie House was probably best stated in a 1957 article in House and Home magazine:
During the decades of eclecticism’s triumph there were also many innovators–less heralded than the fashionable practitioners, but exerting more lasting influence. Of these innovators, none could rival Frank Lloyd Wright. By any standard his Robie house was the House of the 1900s–indeed the House of the Century.
Above all else, the Robie house is a magnificent work of art. But, in addition, 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.
In 1956, The Archectural Record selected the Robie House as “one of the seven most notable residences ever built in America.” In 2008, the U.S. National Park Service submitted the Robie house, along with nine other Frank Lloyd Wright properties, to a tentative list for World Heritage Status. The 10 sites have been submitted as one entire site. The January 22, 2008, press release from the National Park Service website announcing the nominations states that “[t]he preparation of a Tentative List is a necessary first step in the process of nominating a site to the World Heritage List.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robie_House
