robie house planters
On my recent Chicago visit I had the chance to stop by Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark 1909–1911 Robie House in the Hyde Park neighborhood. Unfortunately the foundation that runs it was in the middle of a major renovation inside. Even through we were on an architectural tour the only way to view the interior on this day was stand outside and peer inside through the stained glass windows.
Ooh… (Looking inside, off the second story porch into the nearly finished space…)
Uhhh… (The ground floor, still in the throes of renovation…)
Once we got that out of our system we had to concentrate on the exterior of the building and the gardens. I could think of worse things to have to do.
A pair of side gates opens up to an auto court with a small garden on the side. It was winter and the plantings weren’t any too spectacular this time of year, but the hardscape details were worth a close look.
The thin, wide bricks of the house and garden walls all feature this neat little detail: The mortar between the courses is the typical light mortar color, but the horizontal spaces between the bricks uses a red-colored mortar. The effect is that you notice horizontal bands and not the individual bricks. The house swoops sideways towards the horizon, and the walls do the same, celebrating the ever-expanding horizontal prairie that makes up the Midwest.
Several of the corners of the porches feature these stylized urns. Instead of the chubby Roman models, Wright has designed them to swoop sideways just like the house and walls do.
And there are several of these planters that explode with color in the summer. But now…well, not so green. The story goes that Wright designed these planters without drainage–something that comes as no surprise from an architect who was obsessed with form over function and notorious for creating houses with leaky roofs and suspended terraces that sagged under their own weight.
As I reviewed the photos from the Robie House, though, there’s one thing that starts to gnaw on me. Though it doesn’t look huge, it’s still something like 9000 square feet if you count the outdoor terraces. All the outdoor spaces seemed squeezed in there. Was this a space-intensive urban use of a small lot? Or was it a hundred-year-old McMansion? Even if that, it’s pretty cool as McMansions go…
February 28 2009 08:03 am | Categories: art • gardening • landscape • landscape design • photography • places | Tags: architecture • brick • Chicago • concrete • Frank Lloyd Wright • garden walls • planters • Robie House • walls
Jim/ArtofGardening on 28 Feb 2009 at 12:32 pm #
Good to see this. We have FLW’s Martin House here, also in a state of construction. It’s good to see what FLW did for planters in other houses — even though it looks like he used many of the same devices on the Martin House. Once the weather clears and I can get in & closer, Ill do a post on our FLW house too. Hopefully with a bit more green than this time of year allows.
Steve on 28 Feb 2009 at 12:35 pm #
Having been a fancier of Wright’s work since my parents bought a FLW book when I was about 6 years old, there is nothing I do NOT want to see of his. The detail you discover on that mortaring coloration secret is a design element of uncommon genius, to me. But it is also just pretty much what the guy always did. A friend of mine lived in the only Wright-designed home in Vancouver. There is a hilarious story attached to it, lol, but too long for here. It involved koi and raccoons. Expensive Koi and raccoons.
Philip on 01 Mar 2009 at 6:55 am #
What a pleasure to get your inside tour of the Robie House. The use of colored mortar to increase the visual horizontality of this structure is such an interesting detail. What would you plant in the long planters?
I can see prairie grasses, but that would not be historically correct. I wonder what was planted originally?
All very fun to think about.
All the best,
Philip
Jean on 01 Mar 2009 at 9:22 am #
I love that detail with the bricks. Hadn’t noticed it when I was there. Funny about the lack of drainage holes in the planters. I wonder what they plant in there in the summer? We used to live in a house that we described as a “poor man’s Frank Lloyd Wright house”. Besides a leaky roof it even had planters without drainage holes! The planter we had was about 4 inches deep on one side tapering to about a foot deep towards the other end. It was a nightmare to find something that survived drying out at one end and too much moisture at the other end. The plants that survived the best were cupheas on the dry end and dwarf Cyperus papyrus on the other. Thanks for posting these details, very interesting.
lostlandscape on 01 Mar 2009 at 10:44 am #
Jim, the Martin House is amazing. It’s great that you’ve got it in town and I look forward to a post on it. The Robie House probably gets all the glory because it’s in Chicago.
Steve, the mortar is such a small detail, but one that let’s you get into the guy’s mind and see how the details really make the project. California has some Wright structures, but they’re later in his output, post-prairie style. Besides, we’re not particularly prairie out here.
Philip, the plantings seem to be Wright’s concession to things that strive upwards or trail. I’ve seen some drawings that show plantings in his prairie-style homes that look like some lush, overflowing Babylon, with plants trailing all over the horizontal lines. I did inquire about original plantings, but the no one present was able to answer that question.
Jean, I had no idea you lived in such an “architectural masterpiece”! Your planter sounds like a nightmare to plant, but I’ve had a few times when I’ve wanted to put swamp plants in the same planting as succulents just because of the way they looked together.
Greg on 05 Mar 2009 at 10:57 am #
Some of the best stories, it seems, involved expensive koi and foraging wildlife.
I’m joining the chorus of cheers for that cool mortaring thing…what a cool effect!!
out of doors on 08 Mar 2009 at 3:04 pm #
Amen to swamp plants and succulents! Kicking myself for not taking a picture of the very cool planted pot I found in the lathehouse down at the ancestral manse…someone had tucked away a pot of succulents (I suspect my sister, who really doesn’t like them), and the sword fern invaded. So pretty! oh well, maybe next time.
Lizzie on 18 Nov 2009 at 12:46 pm #
hello. i am doing a history day project on Frank Lloyd Wright, and i was wondering if i could use some of the stuff in you article in my documentury. if you have any suggestions that i can use, i would really apriciate it! thanks! Lizzie ps: if you decide to let me do this, i need your last name to put in my bibliography! thanks again! Lizzie