“'Chicago School': Metamorphosis of a Term”

AboutTraces how the term "Chicago School," coined by Thomas Tallmadge in 1908 to describe the residential architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and his contemporaries (with Louis Sullivan credited only as their teacher/forerunner), was gradually redefined by later historians — notably Henry-Russell Hitchcock and, decisively, Sigfried Giedion in *Space, Time and Architecture* (1941) — to instead mean the tall commercial skyscrapers of 1880s–90s Chicago. Brooks proposes resolving the resulting confusion by reserving "Chicago School" strictly for the earlier commercial-building movement and adopting "Prairie School" (a term Brooks himself first used in 1960) for the residential movement begun under Sullivan's inspiration and led by Wright, tracing Sullivan's own stylistic pivot toward that horizontality around the 1899–1904 Carson Pirie Scott Store commission.

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