Introduction
q Prairie School was a late 19th and early 20th century architectural style, most common to the Midwestern United States.
q 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.
q The term "Prairie School" was not actually used by these architects to describe themselves the term was coined by H. Allen Brooks, one of the first architectural historians to write extensively about these architects and their work
Architects
q The Prairie School is most associated with a generation of architects employed or influenced by Louis Sullivan or Frank Lloyd Wright, but usually does not include Sullivan himself. A partial list of Prairie School architects includes:
- Percy Dwight Bentley
- Barry Byrne
- Alfred Caldwell
- William Drummond
- Marion Mahony Griffin
- Walter Burley Griffin
- George Grant Elmslie
- George Washington Maher
- Dwight Heald Perkins
- William Gray Purcell
- Claude and Starck
- William LaBarthe Steele
- John S. Van Bergen
q The Prairie School was 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).
- One or two-storey
- One-story projections
- Open floor plan
- Low-pitched roof
- Broad, overhanging eaves
- Strong horizontal lines
- Ribbons of windows, often casements emphasize horizontality of overall design
- Prominent, central chimney
- Stylized, built-in cabinetry
- Wide use of natural materials especially stone and wood
Wright's Robie House
q The Robie House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for his client Frederick C. Robie, is considered one of the most important buildings in the history of American architecture. It was designed in Wright's Oak Park studio in 1908 and completed in 1910, the building inspired an architectural revolution.
q Its sweeping horizontal lines, dramatic overhangs, stretches of art glass windows and open floor plan make it a quintessential Prairie style house. Although it was designed more than ninety years ago, the building remains a masterpiece of modern architecture.
Reason for the fall
q Architectural historians says 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. Marion Mahony Griffin writes in her autobiography as:
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.
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