The Allen-Lambe House: Wright's Last Prairie

In nineteen fifteen, Frank Lloyd Wright designed a house in Wichita's College Hill neighborhood for Henry Justin Allen, a newspaper editor who would go on to become governor of Kansas and a United States senator. It was one of the last houses Wright would design in the Prairie Style that had made him famous.

The Prairie house, as Wright developed it in the first decade of the nineteen hundreds, emphasized horizontal lines, deep overhanging roofs, and an integration of interior and exterior space. It was Wright's argument that the flat American landscape demanded a flat American house, buildings that hugged the earth rather than rising above it in European towers.

The Allen house took the style to its logical end. An L-shaped floor plan wraps around a large enclosed garden with a reflecting lily pool at its center. Wright designed it simultaneously with the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, and the influence is unmistakable: the relationship between the house and its inner courtyard has a Japanese quality, the garden serving as a room without a roof. The brickwork is textured. The roof overhangs are deep. The pool reflects the sky.

Wright is generally considered to have moved on from the Prairie Style after this commission. His next decades would bring a long fallow period, then the Usonian houses of the nineteen thirties, then Fallingwater and the Guggenheim. The Allen house is the punctuation mark at the end of one sentence and the pause before another.

The house is now open as the Allen-Lambe House Museum. It retains much of the original furniture and has been restored to its condition in the years from nineteen eighteen to nineteen twenty-three. Standing inside it, you can feel exactly where one chapter of American architecture ended.