Frederick C. Robie House

Frederick Robie was 28, ran a bicycle and motor parts company, and wanted a house with no curtains, no attic, no basement and long open rooms — so in 1910 Frank Lloyd Wright gave him the building that ends the Prairie School by perfecting it. The roof cantilevers 20 feet without visible support. Robie lived in it barely fourteen months before his marriage and finances collapsed and it was sold. It was twice slated for demolition, in 1941 and 1957, and Wright — then in his late eighties — came to the site to fight for it. He said it was still the source of many of his ideas.