Prairie Style's Roots in "Organic Architecture"

For Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), in the settings he created, each furniture piece was part of a larger whole, or structure; his intent, however, was to make each piece retain its individual character. Wright, along with such other contemporaries as Antoni Gaudi, Louis Sullivan, and Gustav Stickley, are known now as "organic architects", because they embraced a philosophy of architecture we now know, thanks to Wright himself, as "organic architecture".

Features of these "Prairie Style" Arts and Crafts bungalows are some of the following: 1) the bricks are made to look handmade, but in fact they are not, but mass-produced to appear so; 2) the foundation stones are commonly found to be concrete blocks, poured into casts to make them look like rough-cut stone. The idea of mass-produced or even machine-made Craftsman materials, of course, contradicts the basic message of the Arts and Crafts movement. The cultural geographer, Pierce Lewis asks, "Would Stickley have been horrified by those pseudo-Craftsman bricks and fake stone foundation blocks?" Source: adapted from Peirce Lewis "The Monument and the Bungalow", Geographical Review 88, No. 4, October, 1998, pages 507-527. Here, in 1903, is the famous architect, Harvey Ellis -- who, before his untimely death in January, 1904, worked briefly for Gustav Stickley telling us in the The Craftsman "How to build a bungalow" December 1903, pages 253-260 Frank Lloyd Wright introduced the word, "organic", into his philosophy of architecture as early as 1908. It became part of the "design grammar" that later is called "the Prairie Style". It was an extension of the teachings of his mentor Louis Sullivan whose slogan "form follows function" became the mantra of modern architecture. Wright changed this phrase to "form and function are one", using nature as the best example of this integration. Read more here but Teague's 1946, Chapter four, "Fitness to Function" -- in his famous Design This Day -- lays out these concepts with clarity. In tortuous prose, Wright famously said "So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal and the teaching so much needed if we are to see the whole of life, and to now serve the whole of life, holding no traditions essential to the great TRADITION. Nor cherishing any preconceived form fixing upon us either past, present or future, but instead exalting the simple laws of common sense or of super-sense if you prefer determining form by way of the nature of materials..." Source: Frank Lloyd Wright, The Future of Architecture, 1939 Original source here Just as Wright sought to remove any barriers in personal residences between the interior and the exterior -- he wanted the natural world part of a home's spaces -- in this sense, his furniture was both intrinsic to the space it occupied and part of the natural world. Because other technological materials were yet to be developed, wood was his chosen material, and he used it with boldness.