William LaBarthe Steele was an American architect from Chicago, Illinois. He is considered a principal member of the Prairie School Architectural Movement during the early 20th century.
William L. Steele, Purcell & Elmslie, Associated Architects, Woodbury County Courthouse (1916)
Prairie School is a late 19th and early 20th-century architectural style, most common in 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 wide, flat, treeless expanses of America's native prairie landscape.
Chicago Avenue side of architect Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio in Oak Park, Illinois, showing post-1911 changes to studio building.
Robie House, 1910. It is considered by many to be the quintessential Prairie house
Harold C. Bradley House, Madison, Wisconsin, by Louis Sullivan and George Grant Elmslie
Woodbury County Courthouse, Iowa, by William L. Steele and Purcell and Elmslie (associate architects)