The Robie House and the Prairie That Lives Inside It

Frank Lloyd Wright's Masterpiece Hides in Plain Sight

The Frederick C. Robie House sits on Woodlawn Avenue in Hyde Park, across the street from the University of Chicago campus, and it looks like a ship - a long, low vessel of Roman brick and limestone, its cantilevered roof extending twenty feet beyond the walls without visible support, as if the house is reaching toward the street with open arms. Frank Lloyd Wright designed it in 1910, and it is widely considered the finest example of Prairie School architecture ever built, and standing in front of it, I felt the specific awe that comes from seeing something you have studied in photographs and realizing the photographs told you almost nothing.

The tour begins in the living room, which is not a room so much as a horizon. Wright eliminated walls wherever he could, replacing them with screens of leaded glass and changes in ceiling height that suggest division without enforcing it. The living and dining spaces flow into each other, separated by the central fireplace - a massive hearth of brick that anchors the entire house and serves as its gravitational center. Wright believed the hearth was the soul of a home, and in the Robie House, he made that belief structural.

The art glass windows are the thing you will remember. There are 174 of them, and each is a geometric abstraction of prairie wildflowers - wheat, sumac, and other plants rendered in a vocabulary of straight lines and right angles and amber and green glass that filters the light into something almost edible. In the afternoon, when the sun comes through the western windows, the living room fills with a warm, golden haze that makes the air itself seem to glow. I have seen stained glass in cathedrals that moved me less.

Wright designed everything - the furniture, the light fixtures, the rugs, even the placement of the flower urns on the exterior walls. The dining table has integrated lamp posts at each corner, creating a room within a room, a pool of light that draws the family inward. The chairs are tall-backed, forming a screen that separates the dining space from the rest of the house. It is controlling and brilliant and slightly mad, the vision of a man who believed that architecture could shape the way people lived and was willing to design every last detail to prove it.

Here is what most visitors overlook: go outside after the tour and look at the roofline from the south side. The horizontal layers - brick walls, limestone sills, extended eaves - create a series of parallel lines that echo the flat Illinois prairie. Wright was not just building a house. He was building a landscape. The house does not sit on the prairie - it is the prairie, compressed and refined and set down on a city block in Hyde Park, still radiating the idea of openness over a century later. Tours run Thursday through Monday and should be booked in advance.