Prairie School

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.

The Prairie School developed in sympathy 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.

The most famous proponent of the style, Frank Lloyd Wright, promoted an idea of "organic architecture" (p. 53),[1] the primary tenet of which was that a structure should look as if it naturally grew from the site.

(p. 53)[1] Wright also felt that a horizontal orientation was a distinctly American design motif, in that the younger country had much more open, undeveloped land than found in most older and highly urbanized European nations.

The Prairie School was also 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.

In her autobiography, Prairie School architect Marion Mahony suggests: 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.

Mahony's and Griffin's work in Australia and India, notably the collection of homes at Castlecrag, New South Wales, are fine examples of how the Prairie School spread far from its Chicago roots.

In addition to numerous books, magazine articles, videos and merchandise promoting the movement, a number of original Prairie School building sites have become public museums, open for tours and special interactive events.