Arts & Crafts / Prairie SchoolIntro
The Prairie School Style 1889–1919
Lowered
ceilings, using a change in level to demarcate space, open planning,
indirect lighting—all these can be traced to this modern, American
style.
American
styles tend to be derived from other countries and cultures. But this
one is all-American, developed out on the prairie. Architect Louis
Sullivan's teachings and philosophy were the inspiration for the style,
which began in 1890s Chicago. Frank Lloyd Wright set the standards for
the genre, which was based on the tenets of the Arts and Crafts
movement. (Indeed, Gustav Stickley embraced the designs of the Prairie
School, publishing Wright and others early on in the pages of The
Craftsman magazine.) Yet it was, on purpose and by design, a Midwestern
style: “modern” and “progressive,” and linked to the broad landscape of
the prairie.
Believing that Victorian rooms were boxy and
confining, Wright (building on such precedent as H.H. Richardson’s
designs and those of architects who developed the Shingle Style)
redefined the American house, creating open, free-flowing space. These
interiors were dramatic and even shocking with their open floor plans
(often centered around a large central chimney), their rows of small
windows, and their one-storey projections. Architects who worked with
and around Wright over the next 25 years developed a style that became
prevalent throughout the Midwest, in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Madison,
and Des Moines.
The style’s influence was far-ranging,
reaching all areas of the country (as well as northern Europe and
Australia), and changing the 20th-century domestic interior. Lowered
ceilings, using a change in level to demarcate space, open planning,
indirect lighting—all these can be traced to this modern, American
style. It helped that the Ladies Home Journal in 1901 published an
article with a plan by Wright, with the headline "Home in a Prairie
Town. " (Thus was the name coined.) In broad strokes, the style was
popularized throughout the country in pattern books. In Radford’s
widely distributed books, for example, many designs featured smooth
stucco, horizontal banding, low projecting roofs, Prairie windows, and
abstract ornament. The ubiquitous bungalow books published in this same
period often included houses labeled “Midwest Bungalow” or something
similar, which were clearly derived from the Chicago school. And if
half the American Foursquares in the country are Colonial Revival, the
other half surely have Prairie lineage; you can see it in their porch
roofs and columns, grouped windows, and articulated water tables.
The
Midwest is experiencing a surge of interest in Prairie-School
architecture. They are being restored, added to, and copied. Not all of
these houses are by Wright--or by George Elmslie, or Tallmadge and
Watson. In the period 1900 to 1920, many architects and even spec
builders put up homes in the regional style. In a recent architectural
survey, the Prairie Style was picked as the favorite style for “dream
houses.” Surely this points to resurgence of interest--and a revival.
Low houses with sheltering eaves and open-plan interiors are being
built from New England to California.
Wright’s houses were
stark and startling when he built them at the end of the Victorian era.
But he was ahead of his time. Now the horizontal informality seems
familiar and relaxing.
