PRAIRIE SCHOOL HOUSES

Architect Louis Sullivan’s teachings and philosophy were the inspiration for the school of architecture that began in 1890s Chicago. Frank Lloyd Wright set the standards for the genre, which was based on the tenets of the Arts & Crafts movement. (Indeed, Gustav Stickley embraced the designs of the Prairie School, publishing Wright and others early on in the pages of The Craftsman magazine.) Yet it was, on purpose and by design, a Midwestern style, “modern” and “progressive,” and linked to the broad landscape of the prairie.

BELIEVING THAT Victorian rooms were boxy and confining, Wright—building on such precedent as H.H. Richardson’s designs and those of architects who developed the