they were "married to the ground." (p. 53) 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 and highly urbanized European nations. Prairie School architects The Prairie School is mostly associated with a generation of architects employed or influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright or Louis Sullivan, though usually not including Sullivan himself. While the style originated in Chicago, some Prairie School architects spread its influence well beyond the Midwest. A partial list of Prairie School architects includes: John S. Van Bergen Lawrence Buck Ransom Buffalow Barry Byrne Alfred Caldwell William Drummond George Grant Elmslie Marion Mahony Griffin Walter Burley Griffin Henry John Klutho George Washington Maher Mason Maury John Randal McDonald George Mann Niedecken (Interior) Dwight Heald Perkins William Gray Purcell Isabel Roberts Francis Conroy Sullivan Claude and Starck William LaBarthe Steele Trost & Trost Andrew Willatzen Taylor Woolley Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie School influence Prairie School houses are characterized by open floor plans, horizontal lines, and indigenous materials. These were related to the American Arts and Crafts movement and its emphasis on hand craftsmanship, simplicity, and function. Both were alternatives to the then-dominant Classical Revival Style of Greek forms with occasional Roman influences. Some firms, such as Purcell & Elmslie, which accepted the honest presence of machine worked surfaces, consciously rejected the term "Arts and Crafts" for their work. The Prairie School was also heavily influenced by the Idealistic Romantics who believed better homes would create better people, and the Transcendentalist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In turn, Prairie School architects influenced subsequent architectural idioms, particularly the less is more ethos of Minimalists and form following function in Bauhaus, itself a mixture of De Stijl grid-based design and Constructist emphasis on the structure itself and its building materials. Architectural historians have debated the reasons why the Prairie School went out of favor by the mid-1920s. In her autobiography, Prairie School architect Marion Mahony suggests: The enthusiastic and able young men as proved in their later work were doubtless as influential in the office later as were these early ones but Wright's early concentration on publicity and his claims that everybody was his disciple had a deadening influence on the Chicago group and only after a quarter of a century do we find creative architecture conspicuously evident in the United