Frederick C. Robie House
Frank Lloyd Wright, American, (1867-1959), architect
Frederick C. Robie House, (1908, Chicago, IL)
Plate XXXVII(a), Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe
von Frank Lloyd Wright
Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, June 1910
Lithograph on tissue
15-3/4 x 25 in.
Collection of Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust
Museum Purchase, 1995.17.57
Photographer: Philip Mrozinski
This plate of the Robie House is from a two-volume portfolio of unbound lithographic prints of architectural drawings, renderings and plans of Wright’s early work. When the portfolio was published in Germany in 1910, it represented a virtual compendium of the most significant architectural designs created by Wright during the first twenty years of his architectural career.
The Robie House was prominently featured in the portfolio with two plates, this one showing the south elevation and third floor plan and a second plate featuring the ground and main floor plans. Designed by Wright in 1908, the Robie House exemplifies all the characteristics of a Prairie style building, along with a streamlined simplification of forms that would result in the building being called by Wright “a cornerstone of modern architecture” and being acknowledged by the European modernists as a major influence on the course of twentieth-century architecture.