Not long ago, the place was a mess, a candidate for public television’s weekly rehab drama, “This Old House.”
The roof leaked. Some of the walls were soggy. The rows of art-glass windows needed fresh putty. Carpets were badly stained. Concrete on the porches had worn away. Termites had eaten most of a playroom wall.
That was the bad news about Robie House, a Prairie-style home in the Hyde Park neighborhood that architect Frank Lloyd Wright completed in 1910 for Frederick C. Robie, son of a wealthy manufacturer of bicycles and sewing machine supplies.
But as they say in rehabbing, it’s amazing what $4 million can do.
These days, public tours continue through the house that Wright built on a narrow lot at 58th Street and Woodlawn Avenue. It was a site favored by Lora Hieronymus Robie, who met her future husband at a University of Chicago dance.
“We want to show people the process,” explained architect Karen Sweeney, director of restoration for the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust, established in 1974 to look after Wright’s home and studio in Oak Park.
In 1997 the trust expanded to include Robie House, drawing up a 10-year plan to save what it called Wright’s masterpiece, “the radical, earth-hugging design that sparked a distinctly American form of architecture.”
These days Sweeney is in charge of considerable scraping, hacking, sawing, scrubbing, laying, welding, sponging, nailing, installing and cleaning up. And that’s just getting the building itself in shape.
This has meant putting on a new roof, replacing the underpinnings of the side porches, replacing load-bearing steel beams, reworking the plumbing and nailing up sheets of plywood to protect the building’s rare windows.
Still to come–at a cost of another $4 million–is the interior.
That will involve replaced furniture, restored fireplaces, rebuilt hutches, reproduced light fixtures, rugs woven in Austria, new china and a range of other furnishings–all following the designs and patterns laid down by Wright.
“We plan to be done by 2007,” Sweeney said, noting that donations of funds are always welcome.
When restored to its original glow, trust staffers suggest, the home will once again amaze the community and visitors from around the world–though, it is hoped, in a more positive way.
As historians recall, some Hyde Parkers wrote the place off when it was first built. One shocked neighbor, looking at the low roof that stretched for 20 feet beyond the walls at each end, harrumphed that “it looks like a steamship.”
But those invited inside were amazed at what trust literature describes as “spectacular lightness and transparency,” helped by art-glass windows and doors that “dissolve” the outer walls of the living and dining rooms.
These days, for the crowds that gather seven days a week in the building’s bookstore, the starting point for tours, the chance to poke through the reconstruction and ask questions is a learning experience.
“We are an educational organization,” Sweeney noted, “so we wanted to teach people how much work goes into a restoration.”
Last week, one visitor asked about the toilets. They weren’t in the best of shape, he was told. But a trust volunteer recently came across one replacement, a 1910-era toilet bowl about to be discarded during renovation of an Astor Street apartment. It awaits installation.
Others wondered about the uses to which a restored Robie House will be put.
“It will be a historic house museum,” Sweeney said. “That means it will be open to the public and available for certain special events.”
Excluded will be gatherings where things are likely to get spilled, such as weddings.
