Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House in Chicago
Prairie Style Building Integrates Passive Cooling with Iconic Design
Mar 22, 2009
The Robie House, constructed in 1908-09 in Chicago, represents the epitome of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie style of housing. It is both a cultural icon of the American way of life and a testament to Wright’s ability to address the impact of the local microclimate.
The Prairie Houses, designed and constructed between 1899 and 1910, feature such quintessentially Wright elements as spreading, low-slung horizontal roof planes and a way of hugging the earth so that the buildings appear to be wedded to their sites.
Inside, each home is characterized by a centrally-located fireplace, usually in stone, which firmly anchors the center of the composition. Living spaces flow into each other, creating a sense of openness unlike most domestic architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Environmentally Sensitive and Site Specific Design
Chicago endures cold winters and hot, humid summers. Wright dealt with these climatic concerns in the Robie House using a variety of strategies, some passive, others mechanical.
The building is composed of three floors. The entry level is on a concrete slab at grade; there is no basement. Also located at grade level are a billiard room, children’s playroom, boiler room and laundry.
Visitors enter from the entrance court on the north side, which is shaded by the terrace above and receives practically no sun. Even on a muggy day in mid-summer this area is pleasant, creating what Reyner Banham, author of The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment, has described as a cool-air-tank effect for the house.
A staircase leads to the second storey where the living spaces are located; bedrooms are located on the third floor. At the second level, a stone fireplace and stairwell effectively divide the large living space into living room and dining room. The long south-facing façade onto the street has windows along most of its perimeter.
To shield this façade from the summer heat, Wright designed an overhanging roof which provides just the right amount of shade. Fenestration along this wall consists of numerous French windows which open to provide ample natural ventilation.
Overhanging roofs on the west and east sides emphasize the horizontality of the building. On the west side, this overhang protects the wall from the overheating effect of a low western sun.
Heating System
The Robie House is a masonry structure, making it a more substantial pile than some of Wright’s other Prairie Houses made of wooden studs and plaster. Nonetheless, its thermal insulation is low and all that fenestration must be heated in a cold winter. Wright used hot water heating for this purpose.
On the ground floor, he incorporated a radiant heating system into the concrete slab. To heat the living spaces above, the house was plumbed with hot water pipes. Banham describes how the system was articulated:
- On the north face, under the half-height windows overlooking the entrance court, radiators stood at floor level behind slatted gates
- The bay windows of the living area had built-in cupboards, at the back of which were hot pipes, with slots in the skirting and cupboard tops to permit the warmed air to circulate
- Another hot water pipe was located in duct space beneath the French windows on the south face of the building, but the dwarf heaters Wright had planned to connect to this pipe were apparently never installed beneath grilles in the floor
The Robie House has a reputation for being hard to heat, but Wright certainly tried to plan for a system that would adequately warm the house during the heating season.
The sheer size and low thermal performance of the Prairie Houses exempt them from the label “sustainably designed,” but Wright’s many innovations are still instructive for architects and builders intent on improving the passive solar aspects of house design.
 |
