analysis of the robie house

frank lloyd wright's Robie House is one of the great homes in architecture history and is a precedent for any house to be designed in the future. i was fortunate enough to have this as my case study and i enjoyed learning all of the great features of the home that make is so famous. i wanted to share with you a few of the main aspects of the house that i found to be important to its notoriety.

horizontal planes:
this is major element in a lot of frank lloyd wright's buildings. this horizontality does so many things at once: it shows movement, utilizes a form to create space, dramatizes the structure, and can serve as a great juxtaposition to surrounding landscape. wrights main horizontal elements occur on his cantilevered roofs. these protrude out from the building and establish a great visual appeal to a pedestrian on the nearby streets while also establishing a relationship between form and function





















shifting rectangles:
i see this building as starting from an exploding box and ultimately ending in the plans simple design of two rectangles shifting side by side one another. this form compliments the site which is 60' x 180' and utilizes every bit of space.



privacy:
wright designed his buildings FOR his clients and not for what society told him how houses should be designed. he recognized that a house was to be a place of solitude and comfort for its tenants and this is no more clear than in the robie house. with its entrance secluded away from the street, the perimeter wall surrounding the house, or the low ceilings and high walls, wright made the house applicable for a private space for its tenants.