Prairie School

Chicago Avenue side of architect Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio in Oak Park, Illinois, showing post-1911 changes to studio building.
Robie House, 1910. It is considered by many to be the quintessential Prairie house
Harold C. Bradley House, Madison, Wisconsin, by Louis Sullivan and George Grant Elmslie
Woodbury County Courthouse, Iowa, by William L. Steele and Purcell and Elmslie (associate architects)

Prairie School is a late 19th and early 20th-century architectural style, most common in the Midwestern United States. The style is 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 wide, flat, treeless expanses of America's native prairie landscape.

The Prairie School was an attempt at developing an indigenous North American style of architecture in sympathy with the ideals and design aesthetics of the Arts and Crafts Movement, with which it shared an embrace of handcrafting and craftsman guilds as an antidote to the dehumanizing effects of mass production.


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