Here is the masterpiece of the Prairie style, the Robie House. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Robie House for a bicycle and motor-parts manufacturer, and it was completed in 1910. Everything about it reaches sideways instead of up: long bands of art-glass windows, dramatically cantilevered roofs that seem to float without support, and Roman brick laid with raked horizontal joints to stress the line of the flat Midwestern land.
Wright meant it as a new kind of American home, open and flowing inside, turned away from the street and toward the family within. It is considered one of the most important houses of the twentieth century, and it nearly fell to the wrecking ball twice before being saved. Walk along the south side and look at how far those roofs extend past the walls; engineers of the day insisted they would collapse, and a century later they still hang serenely in the air.