The Prairie School

Walk through an older neighborhood in Madison or Milwaukee and most houses from 1900 point up: steep roofs, tall windows, towers. Now and then one lies low and stretches out sideways. That’s a Prairie house.

A style for the prairie

The Prairie style grew up around Chicago in the late 1800s and early 1900s, worked out by Frank Lloyd Wright and a circle of other architects who wanted “a modern architecture for a democratic American society” ¹. Instead of borrowing from European history, as the Victorian styles did, they took their cue from the flat Midwestern landscape: long horizontal lines and houses that hug the ground.

How to spot one

The City of Chicago’s landmarks commission lists the common features ¹:

• Horizontal proportions: the house reads as long and low.
• Flat brick or stucco walls, often outlined with wood strips in a contrasting color.
• Windows with abstract, geometric ornament, usually leaded glass in casement windows grouped into bands.
• Hip or gable roofs with wide, overhanging eaves.

Add a broad chimney rising through the middle (inside, a big fireplace at the heart of rooms that open into each other) and a raised base with low walls and planters, and you have the full kit.

The Airplane House

Madison’s only Wright house in the Prairie style was built in 1908 for Eugene and Blanche Gilmore on Ely Place ². Seen from the east, its two symmetrical wings looked like an early biplane, and people quickly nicknamed it the “Airplane House.” It has everything on the list: walls stretching out from the core, a low hipped roof with deep eaves, bands of wooden trim, and ribbons of casement windows with geometric leaded glass ².

To push the horizontal even further, Wright cantilevered a porch roof 12 feet out from the east side. It swayed on windy days and threatened the whole structure, because the contractor hadn’t used the steel cantilever beams Wright called for. Wright’s fix: a porch seat between pairs of posts, tying the roof down to the floor ².

Prairie for working families

Wright wanted the style for ordinary buyers too. On Burnham Street in Milwaukee, a developer built six of his American System-Built houses in 1915–16: four duplexes (Wright’s only ones) and two small cottages ³. The parts were precut and standardized (two-by-fours, inch-thick planks, plaster, and stucco) so the houses could go up fast and cheap. Wright insisted it wasn’t “a ready cut house” but one built by a system that guaranteed the result ³.

They have the Prairie look: rectangular blocks outlined in bold board trim, wide eaves, and a cantilevered second-story porch. But their flat roofs probably scared buyers off, and the Burnham Street houses were the only ones built in Milwaukee ³.

From Prairie to Usonian

Twenty years later Wright’s cheap Usonian houses, starting with the Jacobs House in Madison, carried the same ideas forward: horizontal lines, earth tones, natural materials, and a flat roof with wide overhangs floating over a band of windows ⁴.

Try it

Next time you’re in an older part of town, look for a house from about 1900 to 1920 that lies low instead of standing tall. Check it against the list: low roof, deep eaves, window bands, trim strips, broad chimney, raised base. Three or more, and someone was building under Wright’s influence.