“Review of *The Prairie School in Iowa*, by Richard Guy Wilson and Sidney K. Robinson”

AboutReview of Wilson and Robinson's 1977 history/guidebook to Prairie School buildings in Iowa. Henry credits the book's completeness of illustration and its documentation of lesser-known Iowa architects such as William Steele of Sioux City (a collaborator with Purcell and Elmslie on the Woodbury County Courthouse), but faults its introductory definition of the Prairie School as vague and its failure to distinguish Louis Sullivan's ornamental contribution from Frank Lloyd Wright's formal one. Henry specifically criticizes the book's Iowa-only scope for omitting the closely related Minnesota bank commissions by Purcell and Elmslie (the Merchants National Bank in Winona and other bank work in Grand Meadow, Adams, Le Roy, Mankato, Hector, and Madison), built in the same prairie-town social milieu as Sullivan's Farmers and Merchants Bank in Owatonna, and notes "no monograph on the work of Purcell and Elmslie has even been published."

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28197903%2938%3A1%3C66%3ATPSII%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N