Prairie School Research Paper

The Prairie School was a late 19th- and early 20th-century architectural style, most common to the Midwestern United States. The style is usually marked by horizontal lines, flat or hipped roofs with broad overhanging eaves, windows grouped in horizontal bands, integration with the landscape, solid construction, craftsmanship, and discipline in the use of ornament. (Prairie School) Horizontal lines were thought to evoke and relate to the native prairie landscape. Frank Lloyd Wright started amid Queen Annery and imperial plaster classicism, then the dawn of clarity in the Prairie School works, leading to his more advanced achievements in Japan and California (Kaufmann). Wright soon moved on to develop what he would later term organic architecture

The German term Bauhaus—literally "construction house"—was understood as meaning "School of Building". It was founded with the idea of creating a "total" work of art in which all arts, including architecture, would eventually be brought together. (Bauhaus 1). The Bauhaus style later became one of the most influential currents in modern design, Modernist architecture and art, design and architectural education. The Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. The Bauhaus ideals of integration, architecture, and landscape are envisioned as players in a "universal unity," one that linked the various art and design fields, the academy and craftsmanship, form and function, and design and ideas became the focus of design. Walter Gropius would later see architecture and landscape as expressing a unified concept, that he would think of the house as necessarily set in balance with its site, and that through design he would develop his own home as a component within a functioning and unified system.

. . why not throw away entirely all implications of a post and beam construction ? Have no posts, no columns, no pilasters, cornices or moldings or ornament; no divisions of the sort nor allow any fixtures whatever to enter as something added to the structure.” (Kaufmann). “Wright's understanding of depth. He wrote, “Organic architecture sees the third dimension never as weight or mere thickness but always as depth..,. a true liberation of light and life within walls . . . the outside coming in.(Kramer). Wright is describing the blurred line of inside-outside spaces. Using light as a building material, the more natural light the higher you'll transcend through space as an experience. His use of light expansive spaces derived from what he coined “organic architecture”. Within nature people are active, adapting nature to suit their wants. He saw architecture as a natural process of human life, in turn, feeding back to its parent system. Thus to Wright architecture, mankind, and nature were joined in a grand dynamic continuity, and continuity within architecture indicated that people were aligning themselves-as he believed they should -with the natural forces of life.”