Prairie School
The Prairie Houses are building an architectural style that has established itself in the Midwestern United States in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The Prairie style is, in addition to the adobe architecture of the Southwest, the first housing style in the post-colonial American architectural history, consistently avoids stylistic borrowings from the European architecture. Unlike the adobe style he has, however, been found in the architectural mainstream can not enter.
Several architects ( among them Frank Lloyd Wright, the couple Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin and Alfred Caldwell ) can be used for so-called " Prairie School " to summarize. The associated architects related to Louis Sullivan, but it itself is not considered as " Prairie School " respectively. The term was coined by the architectural historian H. Allen Brooks as an afterthought.
The building of these architects are characterized by horizontal lines. May correspond to the windows were arranged in horizontal rows. The roofs were designed as flat or hipped roof with wide overhanging eaves. The goal was to provide a high level of integration of the building into the landscape - especially the typical landscape of the Midwest: - to achieve the endless prairie.
Frank Lloyd Wright brought this architectural form to the concept of " Prairie Style", which is characterized by open space design, horizontal orientation and the use of natural materials. The concept is related to the Arts and Crafts Movement, the craftsmanship gave the preference to industrial production and put on simplicity and functionality value. So she joined in opposition to the prevailing neo-classical architecture of the time. This concept (eg Walt Whitman ) and the Classic Modern to be understood in the context of the intellectual currents of the American Romantic (eg Bauhaus ).