About the Author
Dixie Legler is an authority on Frank Lloyd Wright and his Midwest collaborators and the author of the forthcoming book Frank Lloyd Wright: The Western Work. She was previously public relations director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.
Minneapolis photographer Christian Korab specializes in architecture and historic interiors. His previous books, featuring his work and that of his famous father, Balthazar Korab, include The Genius of Frank Lloyd Wright: Oak Park.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
-It was a new look for a new century. Low, ground-hugging houses with refreshingly spacious interiors under sweeping roofs, leading to terraces reaching out to nature, all dressed in the colors of the prairie in autumn and simplified with built-in furniture. A group of idealistic young architects in Chicago, led by Frank Lloyd Wright, had succeeded in their quiet revolt against the fussiness of Victorian houses. Gazing toward the horizon, they saw the prairie as the perfect metaphor for redefining the American home.
-"Prairie Style" opens the doors into three dozen of the astonishingly new houses, gardens, and entire communities brought about by this revolutionary band. Here are Wright's first great Prairie houses and a handful of other Wright classics that clearly show why he is one of the most revered architects of modern times. And, finally giving due attention to Wright's Prairie School colleagues-among them Louis Sullivan, Purcell and Elmslie, Walter Burley Griffin, and Marion Mahony-author Dixie Legler takes us inside their own exemplary houses, which responded to a more relaxed style of living with the same serene simplicity that has made Wright's own work such a favorite around the world. These sheltering Prairie-style houses, beautifully captured in Christian Korab's all-new color photographs, inspired generations of homes to come and changed the shape of suburban America.
-Prairie School Designers brought nature right up to the door-and sometimes inside-as the book's select crop of gardens illustrates. The Prairie vision extended even further, to whole communities. Prairie Style visits four of these comfortable neighborhoods, including one just now rising from the prairie, where houses join with the landscape to prove the satisfactions of living in harmony with nature. Attention-getting in 1900, the Prairie style produced a time-less way of building as inviting today as it was a century ago. "Prairie houses," says Legler, "speak to something deep within all of us: rooted in the land, they fill our need to put down roots."
