A Field Guide To American House Essay

According to Virginia & Lee McAlester in “A Field Guide to American Houses” The Modern movement in domestic architecture developed in two stages during the years from 1900 to 1940. The first phase, the Art and Crafts movement, turned its back on historical precedent for decoration and design. Ornamentation was not eliminated but merely “modernized” to remove most traces of its historic origins. There were two distinctive styles of American houses. The first was the Prairie style (1900-20), which began in Chicago under the leadership of Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed many houses in the style during the period from 1900 to 1913. The second phase of the Modern movement began after World War I as a full-scale reaction against all previous architectural tradition. The

Flat roofs and smooth wall surfaces were favored. Both the Modernistic style (1920-40) and the International style (1925-present) are products of this more austere modernism. (Virginia & Lee McAlester 2002) In 1937 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, left Germany to become dean of the School of Architecture at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology. By 1950 Gropius, another important German architect , Mies, and their associates had trained a generation of American students in Bauhaus principles, which have since become central to American design. Although never a widely popular style, International-style dominates American public and commercial buildings for several decades. (Virginia & Lee McAlester 1994) In late 1934 Wright visited a waterfall near Mill Run, Pennsylvania, where Kaufmann family wanted to build a weekend retreat. Wright designed