Inside, more horizontality in the ceiling beams, the Roman brick fireplace, the rows of art glass windows with a flattened diamond pattern in them and even the carpet Wright designed.

Looking at this house, it’s very easy to grasp the concept of Prairie Style as evoking the flat prairie landscape of Illinois.

While Robie House is a signature work of Frank Lloyd Wright, it’s important to keep in mind he had a talented team working for and around him, and they contributed mightily to the overall look of the house. Members of the Wright entourage who had hands in the Robie project were:

• Hermann Von Holst, a Chicago architect who supervised Wright’s projects when Wright left Chicago for Europe in 1909;

• Marion Mahony (later Griffin), a pioneering woman architect who worked in Wright’s office and later left Chicago to oversee construction of the Australian capital city, Canberra, with her husband, Walter Burley Griffin;

• George Mann Niedecken, an interior designer who worked on several Wright buildings and was hired to “superintend color work in Robie house.”

The Robies spent $60,000 to build the house, the equivalent of $1.92 million today. That was a highwater mark; in subsequent sales, the value went down. Frederick Robie sold the house two years after moving in at about a 19% loss. The price was the equivalent of $1.56 million.

It sold again in 1926 for slightly less, the equivalent of $1.54 million, and again in 1958 for the equivalent of $1.31 million, or almost 32% off its original value from 48 years earlier.

Since 1958, the house has never been sold. That owner donated the house in 1963 to the University of Chicago, which still owns it.

In two rounds of renovations, one in the early 2000s and another completed in 2019, $11 million has gone into meticulous restoration, updating climate and electrical systems and replacing architectural details that had been lost over time. If the Robies could come back and see it, they would recognize everything but the air conditioning.

But it’s unlikely either Lora or Frederick Robie would want to come back. Their marriage ended less than a year after they moved in.

Lora Hieronymus Robie was a Class of 1900 graduate of the University of Chicago who met her husband at a campus dance. Frederick Robie had dropped out of Purdue to work for his dad’s Chicago firm, Excelsior, which had evolved from making sewing machine parts to making bicycles, and under Frederick went into motorcycles.

Lora and Frederick, married in 1902, moved into the house in May 1910. Eleven months later, Lora moved out and took her two children with her back to Springfield, where she grew up. Lora claimed Frederick had been visiting prostitutes, and in January 1912 filed for divorce.

The couple’s chosen architect was going through something similar. After construction on the Robies’ house began, he handed the reins of his studio over to Von Holst and fled to Europe with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, whom he had fallen in love with while designing a house for her and her husband in Oak Park.

Both Frank and Mamah had to extricate themselves from their marriages. Ultimately, Mamah paid for it with her life when a servant murdered her, her two children and four other people in 1914 at Wright’s Wisconsin estate, Taliesin.

A few decades later, the Robie House itself was the center of a different kind of drama. The third family to own the house, Marshall and Isadora Wilber, sold it in 1926 to the Chicago Theological Seminary, which was across the street. For more than a decade, the seminary used Robie House as student housing, but then in 1941, the school announced a plan to tear Robie down and build a real dorm. There was an instant outcry about the potential loss of an architectural treasure, but World War II intervened and the seminary didn’t pursue demolition.

That is, not until 1957 — and once again there was a lot of pushback. The faculty of a fine arts university in Germany wrote a letter of protest. In March, Wright told the Chicago Tribune on a visit to the house that “to wreck it would be like destroying a fine piece of sculpture or a beautiful painting.”

The poet Carl Sandburg upped the ante. On a visit to Hyde Park in August 1957, Sanburg told reporters that tearing down Robie House would be worse than a Nazi book burning. Worse, he said, because when a book gets burned, there are still other copies somewhere. The seminary offered to give the building to Chicago if the city would cover the cost of moving it to another spot.

Finally, in December 1957 a New York-based developer, William Zeckendorf, came to Robie House’s rescue. Zeckendorf’s firm, Webb and Knapp, was building a pair of 10-story apartment buildings a few blocks away on 55th Street, and offered to buy Robie House for his Midwest headquarters.

Five years later, when work was complete on the apartment project, Zeckendorf donated Robie House to the University of Chicago.

Since 1997, the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust has been steward and proprietor of the university-owned building, and has poured millions of dollars into making it shine like the treasure it is.

Dennis Rodkin is the residential real estate reporter for Crain’s Chicago Business and Reset’s “What’s That Building?” contributor. Follow him @Dennis_Rodkin.

K’Von Jackson is the freelance photojournalist for Reset’s “What’s That Building?” Follow him @true_chicago.