1.
Purcell & Elmslie
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Purcell & Elmslie, as it was most widely known, was a progressive American architectural practice. P&E was the second most commissioned firm of the Prairie School, the firms consisted of three partnerships, Purcell and Feick, Purcell, Feick, and Elmslie, and Purcell and Elmslie. M. C. A. in Hunan, China. The two principals of the firm, William Gray Purcell and George Grant Elmslie both eventually received Fellowships in the College of the American Institute of Architects, George Feick, Jr. who was son of George Feick, an Ohio contractor, was the original partner with Purcell. Purcell and Feick had been together at Cornell University. They rejoined to tour in Europe together during 1906-1907 and then came to Minneapolis to open their partnership, the firm had offices in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis. A number of works by each of the partnerships are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, C and A West Bismarck, ND, NRHP-listed, specifically the Prairie School residences at 120 Avenue A West, at 610 Raymond Street, and at 402 Avenue B West. The Patrick E. Byrne House was built in 1912, the Timothy R. Atkinson House was built c.1910. Minneapolis, MN, NRHP-listed Windego Park Auditorium/Open Air Theater, between S. Ferry St. and Rum River Anoka, MN, NRHP-listed Woodbury County Courthouse, 7th, sioux City, IA, NRHP-listed Brooks, H. Allen, The Prairie School, W. W
2.
Woodbury County Courthouse
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The Woodbury County Courthouse is located at 620 Douglas Street in Sioux City, the county seat of Woodbury County, Iowa. It is regarded as one of the finest Prairie School buildings in the United States and has declared a National Historic Landmark for its architecture. It is used for legal proceedings in the county, though Sioux City was made the county seat in 1858, the first permanent Woodbury County courthouse was not finished until 1878. It was designed by Des Moines architect William L. Foster and built by brothers Charles E. Hedges, in 1914, the county determined that the courthouse was too small for the city and they decided to build a new one. This building is the current courthouse, located at the southeast corner of Douglas and it is a nearly square four story structure, built out of Roman brick, with granite and terra cotta trim elements. It has a 157-foot eight-story tower, and features work by Alfonso Iannelli over its doors. The northern entrance features metal grillwork designed by Elmslie, the interior floors are marble, and the central rotunda features a glass mosaic drinking fountain in one wall. The interior murals were painted by John Norton of Chicago, in 1973, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1996
3.
Prairie School
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Prairie School was a late 19th- and early 20th-century architectural style, most common to the Midwestern United States. Horizontal lines were thought to evoke and relate to the prairie landscape. The Prairie School developed in sympathy with the ideals and design aesthetics of the Arts and Crafts Movement begun in the late 19th century in England by John Ruskin, William Morris, and others. Many talented and ambitious young architects had been attracted by building opportunities stemming from the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Worlds Columbian Exposition of 1893 was supposed to be a heralding of the city of Chicagos rebirth. But many of the young Mid-western architects of what would become the Prairie School were offended by the Greek, in reaction, they sought to create new work in and around Chicago that would display a uniquely modern and authentically American style, which came to be called Prairie. 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 Prairie School is mostly associated with a generation of architects employed or influenced by Louis Sullivan or Frank Lloyd Wright, although the Prairie School originated in Chicago, some Prairie School architects moved away spreading the influence well beyond the Midwest. A partial list of Prairie School architects includes, The Prairie School houses were related to the American Arts and Crafts movement, an alternative to the then-dominant Classical Revival Style. Some firms, like Purcell & Elmslie, however, consciously rejected the term Arts and Crafts for their work, the Prairie School was also heavily influenced by the Idealistic Romantics and the Transcendentalist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In turn, the Prairie School architects influenced subsequent architectural idioms, particularly the Minimalists and Bauhaus, architectural historians have debated the reasons why the Prairie School went out of favor by the mid-1920s. Perhaps a serious consideration of one of its own members would be worth their serious attention. Mahonys and Griffins work in Australia and India, notably the collection of homes at Castlecrag, isabel Roberts Veterans Memorial Library in St. Cloud, Florida, is another. The House at 8 Berkley Drive at Lockport, New York was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009, the Oak Circle Historic District is a historic district in Wilmette, Illinois, United States. It primarily consists of fifteen single-family homes representative of the Prairie School, the Oak Circle Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 21,2001, it was the first historic district to be designated in Wilmette. Several not-for-profit organizations and on-line communities have formed to educate people about the Prairie School movement
4.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, also known as U of I, University of Illinois, UIUC, or simply Illinois, is a public research-intensive university in the U. S. state of Illinois. Founded in 1867 as a land-grant institution in the cities of Champaign and Urbana, it is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system. In fiscal year 2015, total research expedentures at Illinois totaled $640 million, the campus library system possesses the second-largest university library in the United States after Harvard University. The university also hosts the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and is home to the fastest supercomputer on a university campus, the university comprises 17 colleges that offer more than 150 programs of study. Additionally, the university operates an extension that offers programs to more than 1.5 million registrants per year around the state of Illinois. The university holds 647 buildings on 4,552 acres and its operating budget in 2016 was over $2 billion. Even though Illinois is a university, only about 12% of the budget comes from the state. Between several cities, Urbana was selected in 1867 as the site for the new school, the University opened for classes on March 2,1868, and had two faculty members and 77 students. Gregory is largely credited with establishing the University as it is today, Gregorys grave is on the Urbana campus, between Altgeld Hall and the Henry Administration Building. His headstone reads, If you seek his monument, look about you, the Library, which opened with the school in 1868, started with 1,039 volumes. Subsequently, President Edmund J. James, in a speech to the Board of Trustees in 1912 and it is now one of the worlds largest public academic collections. In 1870, the Mumford House was constructed as a farmhouse for the schools experimental farm. The Mumford House remains the oldest structure on campus, the original University Hall was the fourth building built, it stood where the Illini Union stands today. During the Presidency of Edmund J. James, James is credited for building the foundation of the large Chinese international student population on campus, on June 11,1929, the Alma Mater statue was unveiled. The Alma Mater was established by donations by the Alumni Fund, the University replaced the original university hall with Gregory Hall and the Illini Union. After World War II, the university experienced rapid growth, the enrollment doubled and the academic standing improved. This period was marked by large growth in the Graduate College and increased federal support of scientific. During the 1950s and ’60s the university experienced the turmoil common on many American campuses, among these were the water fights of the fifties and sixties
5.
Louis Sullivan
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Louis Henry Sullivan was an American architect, and has been called the father of skyscrapers and father of modernism. Along with Wright and Henry Hobson Richardson, Sullivan is one of the trinity of American architecture. Form follows function is attributed to him although he credited the origin of the concept to an ancient Roman architect, in 1944, he was the second architect in history to posthumously receive the AIA Gold Medal. Louis Henry Sullivan was born to a Swiss-born mother, née Andrienne List, and he learned that he could both graduate from high school a year early and bypass the first two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by passing a series of examinations. Entering MIT at the age of sixteen, he studied architecture there briefly, after one year of study, he moved to Philadelphia and took a job with architect Frank Furness. The Depression of 1873 dried up much of Furnesss work, at that point Sullivan moved on to Chicago in 1873 to take part in the building boom following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. He worked for William LeBaron Jenney, the architect credited with erecting the first steel frame building. After less than a year with Jenney, Sullivan moved to Paris and he returned to Chicago and began work for the firm of Joseph S. Johnston & John Edelman as a draftsman. Johnston & Edleman were commissioned for the design of the Moody Tabernacle, in 1879 Dankmar Adler hired Sullivan. A year later, Sullivan became a partner in the firm and this marked the beginning of Sullivans most productive years. Adler and Sullivan initially achieved fame as theater architects, while most of their theaters were in Chicago, their fame won commissions as far west as Pueblo, Colorado, and Seattle, Washington. After 1889 the firm known for their office buildings, particularly the 1891 Wainwright Building in St. Louis. Prior to the century, the weight of a multistory building had to be supported principally by the strength of its walls. The development of cheap, versatile steel in the half of the nineteenth century changed those rules. America was in the midst of social and economic growth that made for great opportunities in architectural design. A much more urbanized society was forming and the society called out for new, the mass production of steel was the main driving force behind the ability to build skyscrapers during the mid-1880s. By assembling a framework of steel girders, architects and builders suddenly could create tall, slender buildings with a strong, the rest of the building elements—walls, floors, ceilings, and windows—were suspended from the skeleton, which carried the weight. This new way of constructing buildings, so-called column-frame construction, pushed them up rather than out, the steel weight-bearing frame allowed not just taller buildings, but permitted much larger windows, which meant more daylight reaching interior spaces
6.
Chicago
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Chicago, officially the City of Chicago, is the third-most populous city in the United States. With over 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the state of Illinois, and it is the county seat of Cook County. In 2012, Chicago was listed as a global city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. Chicago has the third-largest gross metropolitan product in the United States—about $640 billion according to 2015 estimates, the city has one of the worlds largest and most diversified economies with no single industry employing more than 14% of the workforce. In 2016, Chicago hosted over 54 million domestic and international visitors, landmarks in the city include Millennium Park, Navy Pier, the Magnificent Mile, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Campus, the Willis Tower, Museum of Science and Industry, and Lincoln Park Zoo. Chicagos culture includes the arts, novels, film, theater, especially improvisational comedy. Chicago also has sports teams in each of the major professional leagues. The city has many nicknames, the best-known being the Windy City, the name Chicago is derived from a French rendering of the Native American word shikaakwa, known to botanists as Allium tricoccum, from the Miami-Illinois language. The first known reference to the site of the current city of Chicago as Checagou was by Robert de LaSalle around 1679 in a memoir, henri Joutel, in his journal of 1688, noted that the wild garlic, called chicagoua, grew abundantly in the area. In the mid-18th century, the area was inhabited by a Native American tribe known as the Potawatomi, the first known non-indigenous permanent settler in Chicago was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. Du Sable was of African and French descent and arrived in the 1780s and he is commonly known as the Founder of Chicago. In 1803, the United States Army built Fort Dearborn, which was destroyed in 1812 in the Battle of Fort Dearborn, the Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi tribes had ceded additional land to the United States in the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis. The Potawatomi were forcibly removed from their land after the Treaty of Chicago in 1833, on August 12,1833, the Town of Chicago was organized with a population of about 200. Within seven years it grew to more than 4,000 people, on June 15,1835, the first public land sales began with Edmund Dick Taylor as U. S. The City of Chicago was incorporated on Saturday, March 4,1837, as the site of the Chicago Portage, the city became an important transportation hub between the eastern and western United States. Chicagos first railway, Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, and the Illinois, the canal allowed steamboats and sailing ships on the Great Lakes to connect to the Mississippi River. A flourishing economy brought residents from rural communities and immigrants from abroad, manufacturing and retail and finance sectors became dominant, influencing the American economy. The Chicago Board of Trade listed the first ever standardized exchange traded forward contracts and these issues also helped propel another Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln, to the national stage
7.
Pittsburgh
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Pittsburgh is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the United States, and is the county seat of Allegheny County. The city proper has a population of 304,391. The metropolitan population of 2,353,045 is the largest in both the Ohio Valley and Appalachia, the second-largest in Pennsylvania, and the 26th-largest in the U. S. The city features 30 skyscrapers, two inclines, a fortification and the Point State Park at the confluence of the rivers. Aside from steel, Pittsburgh has led in manufacturing of aluminum, glass, shipbuilding, petroleum, foods, sports, transportation, computing, autos, and electronics. For part of the 20th century, Pittsburgh was behind only New York and Chicago in corporate headquarters employment, Americas 1980s deindustrialization laid off area blue-collar workers and thousands of downtown white-collar workers when the longtime Pittsburgh-based world headquarters moved out. The area has served also as the federal agency headquarters for cyber defense, software engineering, robotics, energy research. The area is home to 68 colleges and universities, including research and development leaders Carnegie Mellon University, the region is a hub for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, sustainable energy, and energy extraction. Pittsburgh was named in 1758 by General John Forbes, in honor of British statesman William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham. The current pronunciation, which is unusual in English speaking countries, is almost certainly a result of a printing error in some copies of the City Charter of March 18,1816. The error was repeated commonly enough throughout the rest of the 19th century that the pronunciation was lost. After a public campaign the original spelling was restored by the United States Board on Geographic Names in 1911. The area of the Ohio headwaters was long inhabited by the Shawnee, the first known European to enter the region was the French explorer/trader Robert de La Salle from Quebec during his 1669 expedition down the Ohio River. European pioneers, primarily Dutch, followed in the early 18th century, Michael Bezallion was the first to describe the forks of the Ohio in a 1717 manuscript, and later that year European fur traders established area posts and settlements. In 1749, French soldiers from Quebec launched an expedition to the forks to unite Canada with French Louisiana via the rivers, during 1753–54, the British hastily built Fort Prince George before a larger French force drove them off. The French built Fort Duquesne based on LaSalles 1669 claims, the French and Indian War, the North American front of the Seven Years War, began with the future Pittsburgh as its center. British General Edward Braddock was dispatched with Major George Washington as his aide to take Fort Duquesne, the British and colonial force were defeated at Braddocks Field. General John Forbes finally took the forks in 1758, Forbes began construction on Fort Pitt, named after William Pitt the Elder while the settlement was named Pittsborough
8.
Sioux City, Iowa
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Sioux City is a city in Woodbury and Plymouth counties in the northwestern part of the U. S. state of Iowa. The population was 82,684 in the 2010 census, which makes it the fourth largest city in Iowa, the bulk of the city is in Woodbury County, of which it is the county seat, though a small portion is in Plymouth County. Sioux City is the city of the five-county Sioux City, IA–NE–SD Metropolitan Statistical Area, with a population of 168,825 in 2010. The Sioux City–Vermillion, IA–NE–SD Combined Statistical Area had a population of 182,675 as of 2010 and has grown to a population of 183,052 as of 2012. Sioux City is at the head, or the most upstream point to which general cargo ships can travel, of the Missouri River. Sioux City and the areas of northwestern Iowa, northeastern Nebraska and southeastern South Dakota are sometimes referred to as Siouxland. Money recognized Sioux City in its August 2010 issue of the Best Places To Live, Sioux City was also ranked 1st in regards to Metro Populations between 50,000 and 200,000. Forbes placed the Sioux City metro in the Top 15 Best Small Places for Businesses and Careers, the Daily Beast, an American news reporting website, placed Sioux City on their list of The Top 40 Drunkest Cities in America, with a ranking of 14th. Iowa is in the prairie of the North American Great Plains. The area of Sioux City was inhabited by Yankton Sioux when it was first reached by Spanish, the first documented US citizens to record their travels through this area were Meriwether Lewis and William Clark during the summer of 1804. Sergeant Charles Floyd, a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, died here on August 20,1804, Sioux City was laid out in the winter of 1854-55. It became a major Entrepôt to the western Plains, including Mormons heading to Salt Lake City, however, the system fell into bankruptcy and closed within a decade. The city gained the nickname Little Chicago during the Prohibition era due to its reputation for being a purveyor of alcoholic beverages, Sioux City is located at 42°29′53″N 96°23′45″W. Sioux City is at an altitude of 1,135 feet above sea level. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has an area of 58.49 square miles. Typical of Iowa, Sioux City has a continental climate, with very warm, humid summers, cold, dry winters. The normal monthly mean ranges from 20.4 °F in January to 74.3 °F in July. On average, there are 25 days that reach 90 °F or higher,52 days that do not climb above freezing, the average window for freezing temperatures is October 1 thru April 26, allowing a growing season of 157 days
9.
Iowa
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Iowa is a U. S. state in the Midwestern United States, bordered by the Mississippi River on the east and the Missouri River and the Big Sioux River on the west. Surrounding states include Wisconsin and Illinois to the east, Missouri to the south, Nebraska and South Dakota to the west, in colonial times, Iowa was a part of French Louisiana and Spanish Louisiana, its state flag is patterned after the flag of France. After the Louisiana Purchase, people laid the foundation for an economy in the heart of the Corn Belt. Iowa is the 26th most extensive in area and the 30th most populous of the 50 United States. Its capital and largest city by population is Des Moines, Iowa has been listed as one of the safest states in which to live. Its nickname is the Hawkeye State, Iowa derives its name from the Ioway people, one of the many Native American tribes that occupied the state at the time of European exploration. Iowa is bordered by the Mississippi River on the east, the Missouri River and the Big Sioux River on the west, Iowa is the only state whose east and west borders are formed entirely by rivers. Iowa has 99 counties, but 100 county seats because Lee County has two, the state capital, Des Moines, is in Polk County. Iowas bedrock geology generally increases in age from west to east, in northwest Iowa, Cretaceous bedrock can be 74 million years old, in eastern Iowa Cambrian bedrock dates to c.500 million years ago. Iowa is generally not flat, most of the consists of rolling hills. Iowa can be divided into eight landforms based on glaciation, soils, topography, Loess hills lie along the western border of the state, some of which are several hundred feet thick. Northeast Iowa along the Mississippi River is part of the Driftless Zone, consisting of steep hills, several natural lakes exist, most notably Spirit Lake, West Okoboji Lake, and East Okoboji Lake in northwest Iowa. To the east lies Clear Lake, man-made lakes include Lake Odessa, Saylorville Lake, Lake Red Rock, Coralville Lake, Lake MacBride, and Rathbun Lake. The states northwest area has remnants of the once common wetlands. Iowas natural vegetation is tallgrass prairie and savanna in areas, with dense forest and wetlands in flood plains and protected river valleys. Most of Iowa is used for agriculture, crops cover 60% of the state, grasslands cover 30%, as of 2005 Iowa ranked 49th of U. S. states in public land holdings. Endangered or threatened plants include western prairie fringed orchid, eastern prairie fringed orchid, Meads milkweed, prairie bush clover, the explosion in the number of high-density livestock facilities in Iowa has led to increased rural water contamination and a decline in air quality. Iowa has a continental climate throughout the state
10.
Omaha, Nebraska
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Omaha is the largest city in the state of Nebraska and the county seat of Douglas County. Omaha is located in the Midwestern United States on the Missouri River, Omaha is the anchor of the Omaha-Council Bluffs metropolitan area, which includes Council Bluffs, Iowa, across the Missouri River from Omaha. According to the 2010 census, Omahas population was 408,958, according to the 2014 Population Estimates, Omahas population was 446,599. Including its suburbs, Omaha formed the 60th-largest metropolitan area in the United States in 2013, the Omaha-Council Bluffs-Fremont, Nebraska-IA Combined Statistical Area is 931,667, according to the U. S. Census Bureaus 2013 estimate. There are nearly 1.3 million residents within the Greater Omaha area, comprising a 50-mile radius of Downtown Omaha, Omahas pioneer period began in 1854, when the city was founded by speculators from neighboring Council Bluffs, Iowa. The city was founded along the Missouri River, and a crossing called Lone Tree Ferry earned the city its nickname, Omaha introduced this new West to the world in 1898, when it played host to the Worlds Fair, dubbed the Trans-Mississippi Exposition. During the 19th century, Omahas central location in the United States spurred the city to become an important national transportation hub, throughout the rest of the 19th century, the transportation and jobbing sectors were important in the city, along with its railroads and breweries. In the 20th century, the Omaha Stockyards, once the worlds largest, Omaha is also the home to five Fortune 1000 headquarters, Green Plains Renewable Energy, TD Ameritrade, Valmont Industries, Werner Enterprises, and West Corporation. And Leo A Daly, the Gallup Organization, of Gallup Poll fame, Enron began in Omaha as Northern Natural Gas in 1930, before taking over a smaller Houston company in 1985 to form InterNorth, which Kenneth Lay moved permanently to Houston, in 1987. The modern economy of Omaha is diverse and built on skilled knowledge jobs, in 2009, Forbes identified Omaha as the nations number one Best Bang-For-The Buck City and ranked it number one on Americas Fastest-Recovering Cities list. Also, Omaha hosted the U. S. Olympic swim trials in 2008,2012 and 2016, the word Omaha means Dwellers on the bluff. In 1804 the Lewis and Clark Expedition passed by the riverbanks where the city of Omaha would be built, there was fierce competition among fur traders until John Jacob Astor created the monopoly of the American Fur Company. The Mormons built a town called Cutlers Park in the area in 1846, while it was temporary, the settlement provided the basis for further development in the future. Through 26 separate treaties with the United States federal government, Native American tribes in Nebraska gradually ceded the lands comprising the state. The treaty and cession involving the Omaha area occurred in 1854 when the Omaha Tribe ceded most of east-central Nebraska, Logan Fontenelle, an interpreter for the Omaha and signatory to the 1854 treaty, played an essential role in those proceedings. Before it was legal to claim land in Indian Country, William D. Brown was operating the Lone Tree Ferry to bring settlers from Council Bluffs, Brown is generally credited as having the first vision for a city where Omaha now sits. The passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854 was presaged by the out of claims around the area to become Omaha by residents from neighboring Council Bluffs. On July 4,1854, the city was established at a picnic on Capital Hill
