11 Facts About Prairie School

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

Prairie School was an attempt at developing an indigenous North American style of architecture in symphony 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.

Term Prairie School was not actually used by practitioners of the style.

Prairie School developed in symphony with the ideals and design aesthetics of the Arts and Crafts Movement begun in the late 19th century in England by John Ruskin, William Morris, and others.

Prairie School was an attempt at developing an indigenous North American style of architecture that did not share design elements and aesthetic vocabulary with earlier styles of European classical architecture.

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Designation Prairie School is due to the dominant horizontality of the majority of Prairie School style buildings, which echoes the wide, flat, treeless expanses of the mid-Western United States.

Prairie School is mostly associated with a generation of architects employed or influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright or Louis Sullivan, though usually not including Sullivan himself.

Prairie School houses are characterized by open floor plans, horizontal lines, and indigenous materials.

The Prairie School was heavily influenced by the Idealistic Romantics who believed better homes would create better people, and the Transcendentalist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In turn, Prairie School architects influenced subsequent architectural idioms, particularly the less is more ethos of Minimalists and form following function in Bauhaus, itself a mixture of De Stijl grid-based design and Constructist emphasis on the structure itself and its building materials.

An example of Prairie School architecture is the aptly named "The Prairie School", a private day school in Racine, Wisconsin, designed by Taliesin Associates, and located almost adjacent to Wright's Wingspread Conference Center.