Frank Lloyd Wright and his Robie House in Chicago

By Temple Ligon
October 25, 2013
 

On Friday at the Capital City Club, November 8 at 7:00 p.m., I’ll lecture on two buildings and their architects, the Wainwright Building (1891) in St. Louis by Louis Sullivan and the Robie House (1910) in Chicago by Frank Lloyd Wright, probably his most masterful Prairie house. The last lecture already given, the second Friday in October, was on H. H. Richardson’s Trinity Church (1877) in Boston, prefaced by a short history of the streets of Boston. Trinity Church and the Wainwright and the Robie are three buildings in the PBS program, 10 Buildings That Changed America. PBS spent an hour on the 10 buildings, giving about six minutes to each, but we’re getting our discussion of each of the 10 over either a 30-minute or a 60-minute period.
 
For the history of American architecture the most significant architects are H. H. Richardson, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Kahn, to put them in chronological order. Kahn died in 1975. There are many others who could make the list, of course, but this is Ligon’s List, and Ligon keeps his list short. When I say my list, what best illustrates that distinction is the absence of work by Louis Kahn in the 10 buildings listed for the PBS program.
 
Expanding the scope a little but staying inside the bounds of bias and brevity, while ignoring whole fields such as literature and film and dance, in the history of the 20th Century the three most significant cultural contributors are Pablo Picasso for art, Igor Stravinsky for music, and Frank Lloyd Wright for architecture. These three were always up to something different every 10 years or so for the duration of their lives, and when they had made the shifts complete, they also mastered the new provinces.
 
Point being, Wright rates high world-wide across the cultural board for having reached his status as an architect, the mother of the arts.
 
On Friday, November 8, we’ll give Wright 30 minutes, focusing mostly on the Robie House, and we’ll give Sullivan’s Wainwright Building the latter half of the night’s lecture, another 30 minutes. A color-slide lecture is heavily illustrated, using maybe as many as 150 images an hour. Writing about the lecture, however, and discussing the architecture in words only, no slides, leaves us the wealth of two lectures, one here with a dominance of historical anecdotes and another one that’s fully illustrated, leaving visual images in the mind.
 
Wright was born in 1867, and he died in 1959, almost connecting the end of the Civil War with the beginning of space travel. Keep in mind the Russians went around the world 18 times on April 12, 1961, the centennial of the Civil War.
 
The first world event in Wright’s lifetime was the World’s Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893, starting one year later than the 400th anniversary of Columbus setting foot in the Caribbean. At the fair the Japanese installed their exhibit, the Ho-O-den, a reconstructed temple on a rustic island. Wright studied the Ho-O-den’s spatial play among the moveable planes of room partitions, the open floor plan, the shallow roof and its overhanging eaves. Wright’s first employer, Joseph Lyman Silsbee showed his admiration of Japanese art by sharing with Wright his print collection.
 
The late 19C was when Western interest in Japanese culture picked up tremendously. Picasso and his peers were collecting Japanese prints. Gilbert & Sullivan’s hit, The Mikado, made real money on London’s Savoy stage and later elsewhere – so much so the producer Richard D’Oyly Carte developed the Savoy Hotel next door to the Savoy Theater, inventing the theater weekend package. The Savoy was the world’s first hotel with bathrooms in almost every room, and it was London’s first hotel to face the Thames.
 
Later Wright claimed the Ho-O-den was insignificant in his development as an architect. It was appreciation of Japanese prints that mostly influenced his architecture, he said. Still, to walk off the Robie House today is to recall the Ho-O-den of 1893.
 
As Wright was working on the Robie House, he was also working on Mrs. Cheney, wife of his house client, electrical engineer and Michigan graduate Edwin H. Cheney. Keep in mind what was going on: Wright befriended Cheney, designed his house, took his money and then took Cheney’s wife, and all the while Wright was responsible for his own wife and their six children. Everybody lived in tight proximity in Oak Park, Illinois, Chicago suburb and home of Ernest Hemingway, who attended grammar school in Oak Park with Wright’s children.
 
Architect Dan Burnham of Chicago was the master planner for the 1893 Columbian Exposition, but he marketed well beyond Chicago. New Yorkers have always appreciated his Flatiron Building at the corner of 23rd and 5th and Broadway. Burnham was big-time, and big-time Burnham offered Wright three years at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris, three years at the American Academy in Rome, all expenses paid, and a partnership in Burnham’s architecture firm upon returning to Chicago educated. Wright turned down Burnham. Wright was the rebel and Burnham was the establishment.
 
Instead, Wright took Mrs. Cheney with him to Europe in 1909, leaving behind his wife and six children and his client Mr. Cheney. Wright had finished the Robie House in design and construction documents, but construction was not entirely complete.
 
Beginning in 1910, Robie lived in the house only two years before his marriage and his business failed. The house is on the grounds of the University of Chicago across the street from the Booth Graduate School of Business.
 
Wright set up shop in Florence, Italy, cranking out drawings with his son and one of his employees for a German publication of his work. There was a world-famous exhibition of Wright’s work in Germany in 1911, commemorated in a portfolio published by the German firm Wasmuth. The Germans and the rest of the world finally had access to Wright’s work through the published portfolio without touring the Midwest.
 
In 1929 Barcelona was host to the developed world with an exposition, a world’s fair. The German exhibit, a k a the Barcelona Pavilion, was by architect Mies van der Rohe, who had obviously studied the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and reflected his regard for Wright in the spatial flow and open floor plan of the Barcelona Pavilion.
 
Wright considered his tour of Europe with Mrs. Cheney a turning point and returned to Chicago after about a year abroad reinvigorated if maybe a bit too infamous. His hometown fame had only grown in his absence due to close coverage of the couple’s travels by the Chicago papers. Architects were good copy, particularly when shocking behavior was disclosed and discussed with lurid commentary.
 
On August 15, 1914, Wright in Chicago heard horrible news from Taliesin, his Wisconsin live/work compound which included his cottage he built for his paramour, the former Mrs. Cheney. Staying at Taliesin with her that summer were her two children and two draftsmen who worked for Wright’s studio. They and four Taliesin workers were attacked with an axe by a deranged servant. Seven were hacked to death, including the three Cheneys, and the living quarters wing at Taliesin was burned to the ground.
 
(Next week we cover Louis Sullivan’s Wainwright Building. For the first two Fridays in November we will bracket Armistice Day, November 11, with two war stories, both close to the Cambodian border with South Vietnam in 1969 and 1970.)

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