Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House is an early manifesto that, independently of the modern movement in Europe, dissolves the 'box' on the American continent. Wright rejects the traditional house — closed boxes stacked up, sealed by four walls, made of separate rooms — and rebuilds space as the flow of horizontal planes.

The whole emphasis of the house is horizontal: long, low masses echoing the flat prairie landscape of Chicago; joint lines stressed by long, thin Roman brick; and most strikingly, cantilevered eaves that reach metres outward without resting on any column. These eaves stay aloft through the balancing of steel beams within — as much a structural display as a gesture that spreads the house into the land, shades it, and shelters it. The house does not sit on the ground; it spreads into the land in horizontal layers.

Inside, the walls dissolve: the living and dining spaces connect fluidly around the central solid-brick fireplace core, without full partitions between them. The hearth is the house's physical and symbolic anchor; space turns around it, and the corners are resolved in glass so that the edges of the 'box' disappear. Wright's idea of 'organic architecture' and the open plan matures here and directly influences European modernism (especially De Stijl and the Bauhaus, through his published drawings). Robie House is one of the founding buildings of the modern open plan and the horizontal architectural aesthetic.