Craftsman Style vs Prairie School
クラフツマン様式 / プレーリー・スクール
Craftsman Style comes from Furniture and Interiors and Prairie School from Modern Architecture. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Craftsman Style
A style of architecture, interior design and decorative arts that prevailed in the United States from about 1870 to about 1925. It follows the English Arts and Crafts movement in rejecting historical styles for plain simplicity, but its carriers included social reformers, educators and women's organisations as well as architects. It appears most often in modest houses such as bungalows, where materials are treated simply and left visible.
Prairie School
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An architecture of the horizontal line answering the midwestern prairie. Deep eaves, ribbon windows, low roofs and continuity between inside and out established the first American modern house free of imported European styles.
| Craftsman Style | Prairie School | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1870s–1920s | 1893–1920s |
| Family | Furniture and Interiors | Modern Architecture |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Beams and brackets stay exposed rather than being boxed in / No capitals, scrolls or other parts borrowed from historical styles / It works at the scale of a modest house such as a bungalow, not a mansion / Wood and stone are left unpainted, so surfaces are made of grain and natural colour | Emphasized horizontals / Deep overhanging eaves / Ribbon windows / Low-slung roofs |
| Best used for | Fitting out a house or a shop where quality has to come from exposed structure rather than added ornament · Grounding a craft focused brand in an American lineage rather than an English one | Planning a low suburban house to lie along the land and the ground line · Running inside into outside so garden and living room read as one space |
| Type | Set headings in a face with heavy vertical stems, kept modest in size. No decorative rules and no display flourishes. | Wide capitals set in one horizontal line, aligned with the eaves |
| Composition | Emphasise the horizontal and arrange elements low and wide. Order comes from how the members line up, not from symmetry. | A hearth at the core, rooms divided by ceiling height instead of walls |
| Material | Use wood, stone and tile unpainted, and leave joints visible. Keep colour close to the material itself and hold saturation down. | Roman brick and quartersawn wood, only the horizontal joints raked |
| Caution | Staging simplicity as a decorative effect merely swaps one borrowed historical style for another. | Applying the horizontal motif to the elevation while shortening the eaves, so no shadow falls and the lines flatten into surface pattern. |