Raising the Stakes to Save and Restore Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House

A modern architectural palimpsest between politics and preservation practices (1957-67)

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to provide a multi-perspective narration of the stakeholders involved in the political campaign to save and restore the Robie House (1910) in Chicago, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The house was threatened to be demolished in 1957 by its owner of the time, the Chicago Theological Seminary, and eventually saved through an international campaign that set a paramount precedent for American preservation. In 2023 an in-depth study conducted by Daniel Bluestone unraveled the intricate skein of the 1957 events, focusing on the active role of a relentless 89-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright in gathering the media attention to save his work.
This paper, instead, aims to identify the legitimate perspectives of each figure involved in the political campaign to save the property: the Chicago Theological Seminary, the University of Chicago, the Public Institutions, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, and the Webb and Knapp Company, highlighting the complexities gravitating around a restoration case in the United States of America. The objective of this paper, in line with the research of the author, is to underline the peculiarities of American preservation from an Italian scientific perspective. This paradigmatic study case will show how the discourse around the Robie House’s salvation was so pivotal to obliterating any debate regarding the actual principles of the 1967 intervention, when the Robie House became the headquarters of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs, with an interior design reinterpretation by the firm SOM. This lacking debate will set the base for a recurring pattern when, from 2000 to 2009, the house will be brought back to its original appearance, with the erasure of its historic palimpsest, and the subsequent celebration of its authorship, as happened in 1957 salvation, that, other than Wright, was possible thanks to contextual events and different protagonists of the time.