Prairie School

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Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio in Oak Park, Illinois

Harold C. Bradley House, Madison, WI, by Louis Sullivan and George Grant Elmslie

Woodbury County Courthouse, Iowa, by William L. Steele and Purcell and Elmslie (associate architects)

Prairie School was a late 19th and early 20th century architectural style, most common to the Midwestern United States.

The works of the Prairie School architects are usually marked by horizontal lines, flat or hipped roofs with broad overhanging eaves, windows grouped in horizontal bands, integration with the landscape, solid construction, craftsmanship, and discipline in the use of ornament. Horizontal lines were thought to evoke and relate to the native prairie landscape.

The term "Prairie School" was not actually used by these architects to describe themselves (for instance, Marion Mahony used the phrase The Chicago Group); the term was coined by H. Allen Brooks, one of the first architectural historians to write extensively about these architects and their work^{[citation needed]}.

The Prairie School developed in sympathy with the ideals and design esthetics of the Arts and Crafts Movement begun at the turn of the 20th century in England by John Ruskin, William Morris, and others. The Prairie school shared an embrace of handcrafting and craftsman guilds as a reaction against the new assembly line, mass production manufacturing techniques, which they felt created inferior products and dehumanized workers.

The Prairie school was also an attempt at developing an indigenous North American style of architecture that did not share design elements and esthetic vocabulary with earlier styles of European classical architecture. Many talented and ambitious young architects had been attracted by building opportunities stemming from the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago World's Fair) of 1893 was supposed to be a heralding of the city of Chicago's rebirth. But many of the young Mid-western architects of what would become the Prairie School were offended by the Greek and Roman classicism of nearly every building erected for the fair. In reaction, they sought to create new work in and around Chicago that would display an uniquely modern and authentically American style, which came to be called Prairie.

The designation Prairie is due to the dominant horizontality of the majority of Prairie style buildings which echos the wide, flat, tree-less expanses of the mid-Western United States. The most famous proponent of the style, Frank Lloyd Wright, promoted an idea of "organic architecture", the primary tenet of which was that a structure should look as if it naturally grew from the site. Wright also felt that a horizontal orientation was a distinctly American design motif, in that the younger country had much more open, undeveloped land than found in most older, urbanized European nations.

Architects whose work is considered part of the movement

The Prairie School is mostly associated with a generation of architects employed or influenced by Louis Sullivan or Frank Lloyd Wright, but usually does not include Sullivan himself. Although the Prairie School originated in Chicago, some Prairie School architects moved away spreading the influence well beyond the Midwest. A partial list of Prairie School architects includes:

Prairie School houses

The Prairie School houses (characterized by open plans, horizontal lines, and indigenous materials) were related to the American Arts and Crafts movement (hand craftsmanship, simplicity, function), an alternative to the then-dominant Classical Revival Style (Greek forms with occasional Roman influences). Some firms, like Purcell & Elmslie, however, consciously rejected the term "Arts and Crafts" for their work, which accepted the honest presence of machine worked surfaces. The Prairie School was also heavily influenced by the Idealistic Romantics (better homes would create better people) and the Transcendentalist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In turn, the Prairie School architects influenced subsequent architectural idioms, particularly the Minimalists (less is more) and Bauhaus (form follows function), which was a mixture of De Stijl (grid-based design) and Constructivism (which emphasized the structure itself and the building materials).

Architectural historians have debated the reasons why the Prairie School went out of favor by the mid-1920s. Perhaps a serious consideration of one of its own members would be worth their serious attention. In her autobiography, Marion Mahony Griffin writes:

"The enthusiastic and able young men as proved in their later work were doubtless as influential in the office later as were these early ones but Wright's early concentration on publicity and his claims that everybody was his disciple had a deadening influence on the Chicago group and only after a quarter of a century do we find creative architecture conspicuously evident in the United States." ^[1]

Other Prairie School buildings

An example of Prairie School architecture is the aptly named "Prairie School," a private day school in Racine, Wisconsin, designed by Taliesin Associates (an architectural firm originated by Wright), and located almost adjacent to Wright's Wingspread Conference Center. Mahonly's and Griffin's work in Australia and India, notably the collection of homes at Castlecrag, New South Wales, are fine examples of how the Prairie School spread far from its Chicago roots. Isabel Roberts' Veterans' Memorial Library in St. Cloud, Florida, is another.^[2] The House at 8 Berkley Drive at Lockport, New York was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.^[3]

See also

• St. John's African Methodist Episcopal Church
• The Villa District, Chicago
• Oak Park, Illinois

Notes

References

• Brooks, H. Allen, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School, Braziller (in association with the Cooper-Hewitt Museum), New York 1984; ISBN 0807610844
• Brooks, H. Allen, The Prairie School, W.W. Norton, New York 2006; ISBN 039373191X
• Brooks, H. Allen (editor), Prairie School Architecture: Studies from "The Western Architect", University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Buffalo 1975; ISBN 0802021387
• Brooks, H. Allen, The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and his Midwest Contemporaries, University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1972; ISBN 0802052517
• Brooks, H. Allen (editor), Writings on Wright: Selected Comment on Frank Lloyd Wright, MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London 1981; ISBN 0262021617
• Visser, Kristin, Frank Lloyd Wright & the Prairie School in Wisconsin: An Architectural Touring Guide, Trails Media Group; 2nd Rev edition (June, 1998). ISBN 1-879483-51-3.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Prairie School

• Minneapolis Institute of Arts - Prairie School collection
• The Prairie School Traveler
• Organica.Org--Resource includes in-depth records relating to Purcell & Elmslie, architects
• Prairie Styles--An Online Museum of Prairie School Architecture
• The Richard Nickel Committee and Photographic Archive