Robie House, The Prairie School's Masterwork

Frederick Robie was twenty-seven years old when he commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design him a house in Hyde Park in nineteen oh six. Robie manufactured bicycle parts and later automobiles, he had precise mechanical ideas about what he wanted, and he communicated them to Wright in terms that Wright found immediately comprehensible: no attic, no basement in the conventional sense, no formal parlor separated from the living space, no barriers between the family and the outdoors, a garage incorporated into the ground floor for his car. He wanted a house built for how people actually lived, not for how Victorian manuals said they should live.

What Wright designed for him is a building that looks, a century later, like nothing else on its block and like everything Wright built afterward. The horizontal planes extend far beyond the walls, the eaves reaching out so far that from the street the house appears to hover parallel to the ground rather than rise from it. The interior is a single continuous flowing space on the second floor, living room and dining room separated only by a freestanding fireplace mass, the furniture Wright-designed to be part of the room rather than placed in it. The art glass windows fractured the light of whatever season was outside into something geometric and colored and specific to this building.

Wright completed the design in nineteen oh nine and the house in nineteen ten. He completed it while his personal life was already in free-fall: he would leave for Europe with a client's wife the following year, setting off a scandal that exiled him from Chicago for much of the next decade.

The Robie House is a UNESCO World Heritage Site as of twenty nineteen. It sits in the middle of a University of Chicago residential neighborhood, looking like an argument about time.