“Review of the Prairie School, edited by W. R. Hasbrouck”

AboutBrief review by former Prairie School architect Barry Byrne of the first issue of a new quarterly, The Prairie School, edited by W. R. Hasbrouck and devoted in this inaugural number to architect George Maher. Byrne, recalling his own formative encounter with Prairie School work (Maher, Robert Spencer, Hugh Garden) before he knew Frank Lloyd Wright's, credits Louis Sullivan's teaching and Wright's built example as the movement's necessary preconditions. He argues the School's decline after 1914 into fashionable eclecticism resulted from most of its members treating architecture as a matter of surface style, whereas Sullivan and Wright understood style as a "resultant factor" rather than a starting point, and singles out George Elmslie and Walter Burley Griffin (who relocated to Australia after winning the Canberra competition) as among the few who continued pursuing a genuinely indigenous, creative architecture. He welcomes the new quarterly as a counterweight to the predominance of European-derived modernism and a valuable act of recovery for a neglected native tradition.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0047-2239%28196412%2919%3A3%3C47%3ATPS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K