By Michael Good |HouseCalls

Are there Prairie Style houses in San Diego? You betcha

If you were intending to be a groundbreaking architect at the turn of the 20th century, there were basically only two ways you could go. You could go up, or you could go sideways.

Those were the choices available to Frank Lloyd Wright at the end of the 19th century as he pondered how to make his mark in the world. Wright’s mother had groomed him to be a great architect pretty much from conception. From his father, a musician and minister, Wright had received the soul of an artist and the desire of a preacher to convert the unenlightened to his point of view — if not in matters of morals, at least in matters of style.

In short, he was a young man with big plans. He just had to choose a direction.

As often happens, the decision was made for him. “Up” had already been taken—by the Victorians, who had pretty much ruined it with their towers and spires and aspirational Queen Annes. And by Louis Sullivan, Wright’s mentor, who was already making his mark on the world by designing ultramodern skyscrapers in the city of the future, Chicago.

So Wright zigged where others had zagged. He went sideways where others had gone up. He eschewed the straight and narrow in favor of the wide and open. He combined the ground-hugging tendencies of the little house on the prairie with the austerity and discipline of Japanese vernacular architecture and created something entirely new and modern. For six years he let Sullivan focus on the commercial side of the practice while he took the residential side, until Sullivan fired him for designing “bootleg” houses behind the master’s back. This freed him to develop his “new idea in architecture,” the “organic” house. And Wright did it with such assurance and élan that he captivated the popular mind and inspired a generation of like-minded men and women of vision and daring. Together they put the final nail in the coffin of the Victorian and transformed the landscape of America. They created the Prairie Style. And it made Frank Lloyd Wright famous.

Living here in the Far West as we do, it’s natural to ask: What exactly is Prairie Style? First and foremost, it is horizontal. The Prairie is built low to the ground, like its namesake. That ground-hugging impression is enhanced with artistic effects: hipped roofs, bands of wood or glass, earthy materials and colors that draw the eye not up but sideways.

Historians tend to approach house identification as if they were in a duck blind cataloguing the various bits and pieces of a rare specimen. So the official definition of Prairie is a list of details. Put them all together and you’d have a Frankenhouse, but we’ll list a few of them anyway. Among the hallmarks of the style: unpretentious low-pitched roofs with deep sheltering eaves; secluded entrance; simple and hospitable front door; exteriors of stucco or brick; walls in earthen hues, sometimes relieved by wooden banding or stick work; interior walls that act like “screens,” transmitting light and air; casement windows placed in bands; art glass; and an open, flowing floor plan.

Are there Prairie Style houses in San Diego? You betcha. But the men and women who built them here were not exactly checking off a list of attributes as they sat at their drafting tables. They were drawing (literarily and figuratively) from the philosophy, design ideas and stylistic elements of the Prairie in creating their own version of the modern, practical, unpretentious Southern California house. Historians may call these regional builders “imitators” — or even worse, “poor imitators” — but they were creating useful, practical, realistic modern houses for the San Diego lifestyle. Wright often had to twist his clients’ arms (or deceive them) to build what he wanted, and those experiments were often beautiful failures that didn’t suit the clients’ needs or lifestyles and didn’t hold up over time.

San Diego’s Prairie Style houses have endured, however, and remain popular and practical as ever today.

There are four built by Nathan Rigdon in a cluster on Arguello Street in Mission Hills that will be the subject both of a lecture on Jan. 17 and a walking tour this spring. Of the many San Diegans who built Prairie School influenced houses, Nathan Rigdon is particularly celebrated because he did it so well. Rigdon used bands of double-hung windows, hipped roofs, deep eaves, large roof brackets, porch walls with heavy caps and, inside, either a band of wood casing that circles the room at window height or a heavy, coved, built-up crown molding to emphasize the horizontal. Unlike Wright, he embraced classical design with his molding arrangements and porch pillars (which are sometimes Greek in style and proportion). Rigdon also favored octagonal columns, which he incorporated into the breakfronts and fireplaces and as room dividers in the flowing floor plan.

In the 1920s, Rigdon and other San Diego builders moved on to other styles. Some historians call Prairie Style short-lived. But 20 years is a pretty good run for a fashion style, particularly one that had no precedent and sprung whole from the collective minds of a couple dozen 20th-century trendsetters. For Wright, the houses we call Prairie were just part of a continuum of “organic “ houses that included the Textile Block houses he built in Los Angeles, Falling Water in Pennsylvania and his many “Usonian” houses.

After World War II, architects and builders regrouped, embracing low-cost housing, mass-produced materials, and production-line building techniques. And they again turned to Wright for inspiration. The low-slung horizontal house with the flowing floor plan reemerged in the form of the California Ranch House, which swept the nation and became the most popular house style in American history. San Diegan Cliff May is often called the father of the ranch, and is sometimes credited for being one of the most prolific California architects of the 20th century. But Frank Lloyd Wright remains the world’s best-known architect, and the Prairie Style House is his most appealing and practical creation.

“The Prairie Style: From the Midwest to Mission Hills” takes place on Saturday, Jan. 17, from 12 – 4 p.m. at the Francis Parker Lower School, 4201 Randolph St., 92103. Tickets are $10 each or $15 for two. I’ll be discussing Prairie Style interiors, the “enclosed space within” that Wright called “the reality of the building.” Kiley Wallace will cover the history of the style, and Ron May will talk about Prairie Homes located in Mission Hills. If you find yourself looking at your home in a new light and wonder if it might be a Prairie, send me a photograph at [email protected]. If you’re quick about it, I may include your house in my illustrated lecture.

—Contact Michael Good at [email protected].