UPDATED 2020
Prairie School Architecture in Winnetka
When one thinks of the Midwest, one thinks of prairies, no? Grasses that would come up to the withers on horses making their way through the (formerly) vast prairies of Illinois. What makes Prairie really unique to us is that it is totally indigenous, the first architectural style to not be based on a European model. It's 100% American and was revolutionized by Frank Lloyd Wright when he was getting started in Oak Park, Illinois.
Frank Lloyd Wright felt that Victorian homes were boxy and confining with their maze of smaller rooms and he envisioned low horizontal lines with open interior spaces. Prairie houses were designed to blend in with the flat prairie landscape. They are usually built of stucco, are almost always irregular in shape and are characterized by broad, overhanging eaves. Ornamentation is rare in these homes with the most evident being beautiful stained glass windows. The design was simple and straightforward and was supposed to represent a structure that simply grew from the site.
Although Winnetka does not have any homes directly designed by Wright, there are several done by his colleagues, most notably Walter Burley Griffin, Barry Byrne, John Van Bergen and George Washington Maher.
19 Warwick Road
38 Abbotsford Road
402 Hawthorne
1015 Starr (demolished)
Comments (3)Subscribe to CommentsComment