The Prairie School was an indigenous Midwestern phenomenon. Beginning in the Chicago suburbs during the 1890s, it spread outward through the entire region in the first two decades of the 20th century. Many of its most distinctive achievements were in small towns, such as Mason City, Iowa, and Owatonna, Minnesota. Unquestionably, the spiritual leader of the movement was Louis Sullivan (1856–1924), who developed a philosophy that emphasized the organic quality inherent in a successful building. In his buildings, by his writings, and by the force of his charismatic personality, he passed this philosophy on to a group of young architects who became his disciples. Without doubt, the most gifted of these was Frank Lloyd Wright, who was with Adler and Sullivan for six years prior to his departure to found his own office in 1893. Wright saw the provision of well-designed houses for the newly affluent Midwestern upper-middle class as a great opportunity. His clients did not possess great fortune but were generally technological entrepreneurs. Many had a taste for music. Wright gave them dwellings that responded to the vision of Sullivan and that at the same time went beyond that vision to achieve a synthesis very much his own. For the next 15 years, he pursued his goals with remarkable vigor and great success. The first executed houses in which the new style was fully visible were the Bradley house (1900) in Kankakee, Illinois, and the Ward Willits house (1901) in Highland Park, Illinois. In the next few years, there followed a number of important works, notably the Davenport, Dana, Heurtley, Huntley, and Thomas houses, all finished by 1904. These houses had important elements in common: flowing interior space, directional or centrifugal lines, generous low roofs with pronounced overhangs, broad chimneys, reduced floor heights, rows of casement windows, geometric leaded glass, and an intimate relationship to the site. The interiors featured furniture and sometimes fabrics designed by the architect. Wright’s objective was to control every aspect of the architectural experience. All were designed on a unit system, meaning that they were based on a single module with a length equal to some specific architectural element, often, as in the Willits house, the distance between center lines of window mullions. None of these houses show any hint of historicism. Although most were located in suburbs, with varying kinds of topography, all reflected the horizontal lines of the prairie.

The sources of these designs, for Wright and for the gifted young men and women in his Oak Park studio, were mixed. They owed something to the earlier Shingle style, and they owed much to the contemporary English Arts and Crafts movement. The houses of Voysey and the theoretical writings of C.R.Ashbee were discussed as they appeared in the pages of The Studio. In addition, they owed a debt to Japanese art, which most of them knew through prints (Hokusai and Hiroshige were familiar names). After 1904, the year of the St. Louis World’s Fair, there was a bit of influence from Germany and Austria. All these influences, however, were melded by Wright and the staff of his studio into a distinctive Midwestern and American expression.

Among Wright’s studio apprentices, the most important were Marion Mahony, Walter Burley Griffin, William Drummond, and Barry Byrne. All were substantially influenced by Wright, and all in later years made substantial contributions of their own. Their contemporaries spoke of a “New School of the Midwest.” Outside the studio, Hugh Garden, Robert Spencer, and George Maher, at different times in their careers, produced excellent designs in the Prairie School manner.

In Minneapolis the firm of Purcell and Elmslie developed its own distinctive version of the style. By 1910 it was generally recognized in the nation’s architectural press that the most progressive tendencies in American architecture were in the Mid-west. Wright’s own series of articles in The Architectural Record titled “In the Cause of Architecture” (1909) were perhaps the clearest evidence of this evaluation. International recognition came with the publication of the famous Wasmuth folio on his work (Berlin, 1910) and with the influential articles of Hendrik Berlage for the Schweizerische Bauzeitung in 1911. These publications had substantial impact on the Modern movement in Europe.

For Wright the climax of his Prairie period came with the great houses of 1908–09, particularly the Robie (1908) and Coonley (1909) houses, the first in Chicago and the second in Riverside, Illinois. Among public buildings, his major achievements were Unity Temple (1904–05) in Oak Park and the headquarters for the Larkin Company in Buffalo, New York, done in the same years. The Prairie School idiom, however, was not one that lent itself easily to large public buildings and industrial structures. There are a few of these. In the latter category, Hugh Garden made some noteworthy contributions with the Grommes and Ullrich Building (1901), the Schoenhofen Brewery (1905), and the Dwight Building (1910), all in Chicago. The last structure was for a printing company and was framed in flat-slab concrete. The Prairie School architects also did a few churches. Of these, Sullivan’s Methodist Episcopal Church (1910) in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with a contribution by George Elmslie, is perhaps the finest. On the whole, however, the Prairie School aesthetic lent itself to houses and small commercial buildings, and it is these building types by which its practitioners should be judged.

Prairie School architects attempted almost every problem in the decorative arts, and they had great success with chairs, tables, case furniture, fabrics, and perhaps most important of all, leaded glass; their achievements would have been impossible without the cooperation of cabinetmakers such as John W.Ayers and glass studios such as Giannini and Hilgart and the Linden Glass Company; and for Wright, the assistance of the Milwaukee interior decorator George Niedieken was vital in such large commissions as the Robie and Coonley houses and the May house (1909) in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The architects saw building as a cooperative process in which client, designer, and artisan all had important roles to play. Among themselves, they deplored the tendency of Wright to claim all the credit for their achievement, as he commonly did after 1913–14.

In certain respects, the Prairie School style can be understood as an idiom that could be employed by architects who had little or no contact with Wright, Sullivan, or Chicago. For the central figures—Wright, Sullivan, Griffin, and Purcell and Elmslie—architectural design was an act of faith, an optimistic faith in the liberal ideals of American democracy. They liked to think of their architecture as “progressive” and strongly disliked the academic traditionalism of McKim, Mead and White and their Eastern contemporaries. In fact, they viewed it as a rehash of outworn European forms. The Prairie School manner, however, was sufficiently attractive that it was sometimes employed by architects who had relatively little sympathy with the ideals of the leaders. Thus, Osgood and Osgood in Grand Rapids, a firm that was essentially eclectic, did two houses in a distinctly Prairie School manner. These dwellings might well have been responses to client demand. Sidney Robinson and Richard Guy Wilson have shown that Iowa is dotted with buildings that have Prairie School elements. The same kind of demonstration could easily be made for Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois. Wilson and Robinson also argue that the Prairie School had two distinct and separate phases. The first has been identified as from 1900 to about 1920. They date the second from Wright’s return to the Midwest in the 1930s and cite his later Iowa houses and the work of Alfred Caldwell in Dubuque. This position is arguable, and it has recently received support in Frank Lloyd Wright and Colleagues: Indiana Works (Michigan City, Indiana, 1999). This exhibition catalog also includes certain projects by the landscape architect Jens Jensen, whose stature in his field is comparable to that of Wright in the building arts. Jensen certainly had a prominent role in the development of the Prairie symbolism.

The gradual decline of the original Prairie School after 1914 was the result of several broad historical factors. For a variety of reasons, the supply of clients willing to accept the innovations advocated by the architects dwindled considerably. Women were becoming increasingly important in American society, and as Thomas Tallmadge pointed out, wives now received their education from magazines edited in Boston and New York. In 1910 House Beautiful, which had always been sympathetic to the Prairie School architects, moved its offices to New York. The last prairie houses appeared in its pages in 1914. The story of Country Life in America is similar. Its last mention of a prairie house was in January 1914, when it featured a dwelling in Seattle by Andrew Willatzen, who had worked in Wright’s office and absorbed some of his thought. The general shift of the publishing industry to New York had enormous consequences for the cultural life of the entire nation, as it meant a homogenization of American culture. The Prairie School had flourished as a healthy type of regionalism, and regionalism became unfashionable.

The architects themselves withdrew from the Midwestern scene. Wright’s personal life was chaotic, and he spent much of the decade of World War I in Japan. Sullivan, the philosophical leader of the group, was able to build only a handful of small banks and gradually descended into poverty and alcoholism. Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony, two of Wright’s most talented apprentices, went to Australia in 1913 and spent most of their careers in that country. Purcell went to Philadelphia in 1918 to enter the advertising business and in 1922 moved to the West Coast because of ill health. Nonetheless, the achievement of the Prairie School was substantial, and it left the Mid- west a great legacy in the form of a large number of buildings that are sought out and admired to this day.

LEONARD K.EATON

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.3 (P-Z).  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.

WRIGHT, FRANK LLOYD;

CHICAGO;

FUTHER READING

The drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright are held by the Taliesin Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. The Northwest Architectural Archives at the University of Minnesota holds the Purcell and Elmslie Collection, whereas the Prairie Archives at the Milwaukee Art Museum holds those of George Niedecken. The Burnham Library at the Chicago Art Institute and the Avery Library at Columbia University also have many drawings relating to the Prairie School.

Art museums across the United States own examples of Prairie School work in the decorative arts including the Chicago Art Institute, Milwaukee Art Museum, and Minneapolis Art Institute, Minnesota. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has the important triptych of windows from the Coonley Playhouse and has restored the living room of the Francis Little house (Wayzata, Minnesota, 1913). Both of these are works by Frank Lloyd Wright. Several of Wright’s prairie houses have been restored. The most notable ones are the Susan Lawrence Dana house (Springfield, Illinois, 1902) and the Meyer May house (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1909). A restoration of the Robie house (Chicago, 1908) is in process.

The literature on Frank Lloyd Wright is enormous and continues to expand. Aside from the important but often misleading An Autobiography (New York and London: Longman Green, 1932), the most significant comprehensive works for Wright’s prairie period are:

Ausgefuhrte Bauten and Entwurfe von Frank Lloyd Wright, Berlin: Wasmuth, 1910; reprint, Tubingen: Wasmuth, 1986; as Studies and Executed Buildings, London: Architectural Press, and New York: Rizzoli, 1986

Brooks, Harold Allen, The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and His Midwest Contemporaries, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972; New York: Norton, 1976

Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, In the Nature of Materials, 1887–1941: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, New York: Duell Sloan and Pierce, and London: Elek Books, 1942

Hoffmann, Donald, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House: The Illustrated Story of an Architectural Masterpiece, New York: Dover, 1984

Hoffmann, Donald, Frank Lloyd Wright: Architecture and Nature, New York: Dover, 1986

Hoffmann, Donald, Understanding Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architecture, New York: Dover, 1995

Hoffmann, Donald, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Dana House, Mineola, New York: Dover, 1996

The Life-Work of the American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, edited by H.-T.Wijdeveld, Santpoort, Holland: C.A.Mees, 1925; reprint, New York: Horizon Press, 1965

Manson, Grant Carpenter, Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910, New York: Reinhold, 1958; London: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1979

Storer, William Allin, The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993

Van Zanten, David T. (editor), Walter Burley Griffin: Selected Designs (Palos Park, Illinois: Prairie School Press, 1970) 

The files of The Prairie School Review published by Bill and Marilyn Hasbrook of Park Forest, Illinois, from 1964 to 1972 is another invaluable source of information. Particularly notable are the articles by Joseph Griggs on Iannelli (2, 4, 1965), David T.Van Zanten on Marion Mahoney Griffin (3, 2, 1966), Donald Hoffman on Parker Berry (4, 1, 1967), and Robert E.McCoy on Griffin’s work at Mason City (5, 3, 1968). Through the Prairie School Press, the Hasbroucks have also made available reprints of many important Prairie School documents such as the original publication on Purcell and Elmslie in The Western Architect. In the end, however, the most important documentation of the Prairie School is the buildings themselves. They stand as the legacy of an era in which the Midwest, in no uncertain terms, challenged the traditional cultural leadership of the East. As the years pass, the challenge looks increasingly significant.