The Prairie School in Mason City
Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s greatest architect, left Louis Sullivan in 1893 to begin his independent journey as an architect in Chicago. There, Sullivan, in particular, had been responsible for the evolution of the skyscraper into a mature art form.
The young architects of Chicago were struggling against the dominance of past European architectural styles as they sought to invent a uniquely American architectural style of their own. Though blessed with many wealthy clients who commissioned large showplace homes, Wright felt a strong calling to address the needs of the middle class. He wanted to create for them houses that would improve their quality of life.
The new “Chicago Style”, which we now call the “Prairie School”, began clearly to emerge from the meaningless detail of the Victorian era just before the turn of the twentieth century. Wright introduced Chicago’s alternative to the prevalent American vernacular style, the Foursquare, with his brief article, “A Fireproof House for $5,000”, in the April, 1907 issue of the Ladies Home Journal. It described a reinforced concrete house with flat roofs and entrance hall, living room, dining room, veranda and kitchen on the first floor, and a bedroom in each of the four upstairs corners with a bath somewhere in-between. This room arrangement could describe the Foursquare. – Instead, Wright’s house was describing its antithesis. A year later, in Mason City, Wright designed the Stockman house, the third elaboration on the floor-plan of the "fireproof house." It had a similar room configuration but was of wooden balloon-fame construction with a hip-roofed central section, veranda and cantilever portico roof.
The conventional front hall of the Foursquare was no longer “conventional” or “front”. It was at grade level on the side of the house, a separate one-story wing opposite the veranda, which was also a separate one-story segment. The veranda communicated directly with the living room and dining room as they flowed together around a central fireplace, without separating walls. The veranda has a garden entrance to its rear, invisible from the street so that living room, dining room and veranda become one great private living space, each with flower boxes outside and ceiling lines extending beyond glass boundaries, making for a feeling of indoor-outdoor communication unknown in for its era. The 8 ½ foot cantilever roof sheltering the principal entrance is one of the many elements that make this structure ever-so-far from being a box.
We like to show visitors how the open spaces of this pivotal house led the way to the open spaces of the contemporary American home. Built four years earlier, it also bears a direct lineal relationship to the houses directly across the street in the Rock Glen / Rock Crest National Historic District. Our Rock Glen /Roc Crest neighborhood is the largest group of houses by the architects of the Prairie School unified by a natural setting they share. Five houses are by Walter Burley Griffin, the father of modern architecture to Australians, and, with Wright, the co-developer of the “L-shaped open floor plan”. Beside Griffin, Rock Crest / Rock Glen contains two houses by Francis Barry Byrne, one by local architect Einar Broaten, and one a Usonian house by Curtis Besinger. On the south edge of Rock Crest is a beautiful Prairie style house done by William Drummond when he was here supervising the last months of construction of Frank Lloyd Wright’s City National Bank and Park Inn Hotel.
The crown of the Prairie School Presence in Mason City, when restored, will be Frank Lloyd Wright’s only remaining hotel, the Park Inn, together with one of his two banks, the City National Bank. They are two segments of one building, each segment symmetric within itself but neither contributing to the overall symmetry of the entire building. They are joined by a narrower waist containing the building’s principal entrance as was also the case in Wright’s other major public buildings of his Prairie School period, the Larkin Building, 1903, in Buffalo, and Unity Temple, 1904, in Oak Park. Standing as the pivotal building between Wright’s Prairie School period and the period in which he did his two world-class buildings of social pleasure, Midway Gardens in Chicago and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, the overall massing of the Park Inn anticipates them. All three have a central section in which the upper levels rise gradually from front to back while contained by two flanking wings of constant height assisted in their containment by towers or massive chimneys on the medial borders of the flanking wings.
The Park Inn Hotel is presently undergoing rehabilitation to become a modern boutique destination hotel in which all the interior public spaces will be restored to their original appearance. One of the highlights of this rehabilitation will be the re-creation of the original dining room area with its restored original stained-glass ceiling. Included in this planning will be the rehabilitation of the City National Bank Building.
Mason City has an unusually compact city center, almost like an old European city. Our “Cultural Crescent” extends for six blocks from the City National Bank – Park Inn Hotel building complex, past the Meredith Willson boyhood home and Music Man Square Willson Museum, the Public Library (Holabird and Root, 1939), the Tudor revival style Charles H. MacNider Art Museum, with its outstanding collection of American art and a focus on American Regional art, on past the Meredith Willson footbridge and the Rock Glen / Rock Crest National Historic District to end at the Stockman House, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School answer to the Foursquare and a great influence on the future design of the American middle class home. Immediately adjacent to the north of the Stockman House will be its Prairie School Interpretive Center. Its purpose will be to interpret and celebrate our rich Prairie School heritage at home and beyond.
