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The Differences Between Prairie Style Architecture And Hi-Tech Architecture

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In this paper I will be discussing and contrasting the differences between Prairie Style architecture and Hi-tech architecture. We will go over the origin, the years it was used, the main components and characteristics, some of the architects that used these design types, a few real=-world examples, and we will compare them. Prairie School was a late 19th- and early 20th-century architectural style, most common to the Midwestern United States. The style is usually marked by horizontal lines, flat or hipped roofs with broad overhanging eaves, windows grouped in horizontal bands, integration with the landscape, solid construction, craftsmanship, and discipline in the use of ornament. Horizontal lines were thought to evoke and relate to the …show more content…

The designation Prairie is due to the dominant horizontality of the majority of Prairie style buildings which echoes the wide, flat, treeless expanses of the mid-Western United States. The most famous proponent of the style, Frank Lloyd Wright, promoted an idea of "organic architecture", the primary tenet of which was that a structure should look as if it naturally grew from the site. Wright also felt that a horizontal orientation was a distinctly American design motif, in that the younger country had much more open, undeveloped land than found in most older, urbanized European nations.

Hi-tech architecture, also known as Structural Expressionism, is a type of Late Modern architectural style that emerged in the 1970s, incorporating elements of hi-tech industry and technology into building design. Hi-tech architecture appeared as revamped modernism, an extension of those previous ideas helped by even more technological advances. This category serves as a bridge between modernism and post-modernism; however, there remain gray areas as to where one category ends and the other begins. In the 1980s, hi-tech architecture became more difficult to distinguish from post-modern architecture. Some of its themes and ideas were later absorbed into the style of Neo-Futurism art and architectural movement.

Like Brutalism, Structural Expressionist buildings reveal their structure on the outside as well as the inside, but with visual emphasis placed on the

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