Styles and Movements
Prairie School
Also Known As Prairie Style
Modern
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The regional American style Frank Lloyd Wright led from Chicago beginning around 1900, built low and horizontal to echo the flat Midwestern prairie, with deep overhanging eaves, ribbons of art-glass windows, open interconnected interiors and a rejection of applied historical ornament in favor of geometric abstraction drawn partly from Japanese design. Wright's own houses and the wider Prairie circle, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin among them, carried it into the early twentieth century before European modernism eclipsed it in critical attention, even as Wright's 1910 Wasmuth Portfolio publication in Germany carried the work back across the Atlantic.
Facts
PeriodWright's own Prairie output effectively ended around this point as he turned to other work; the wider circle continued some years longer. Origin RegionMidwestern United States (Chicago) 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Influenced
Why this is disputed. Wright's 1910 Wasmuth Portfolio reached European architects including early modernists, and historians widely note the connection, but how much it actually shaped International Style design as opposed to running in parallel with independent European developments is genuinely argued rather than settled.
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