PRAIRIE STYLE TRICKLES DOWN

POPULARIZING PRAIRIE STYLE

Residential home designs by Frank Lloyd Wright and other Prairie School architects were promoted in popular magazines at the turn of the century. The illustrations below show a Wright design which was published in 1901 in the Ladies Home Journal. The article was titled "A Home In A Prairie Town."

Influence On Middle-Class Homes:

Prairie Style homes were custom homes, designed and built for wealthy clients. It was not possible to build entire subdivisions full of Prairie Style homes for middle-class buyers, because these folks didn't have the money to pay for the expensive materials and building practices which were used in Prairie Style homes.

But the national publicity given to Prairie Style had a big influence on homes built for the middle class.

Builders took the existing home plans for so-called "American Four-Square" homes and changed some of the exterior design elements to give them more of the ground-hugging look which was favored by the Prairie School. They lowered the rooflines by substituting hip roofs for gabled roofs. They boxed in the eaves and extended them farther out beyond the walls. They incorporated more horizontal lines into the exterior facade. And they changed from tall narrow windows to wider windows "ganged" in groups of two or three windows.

As the elements of Prairie School design began to be incorporated into the planbooks used by homebuilders all over the United States, new suburban neighborhoods lost the last vestiges of "Victorian" appearance.

All Good Things Come To An End:

Ideas evolve in architecture just as they evolve in other fields of human endeavor. The influence of the Prairie School reached a zenith in the years before World War I, but the war introduced new ideas into American thought and culture. Historical revival styles became popular at the end of war. Both the Prairie Style homes and the Craftsman Bungalows began to look old-fashioned.

After World War I, the Prairie School lived on only in the builders' planbooks and in the continued popularity of many of its key concepts.