View allAll Photos Tagged Prairie
A Prairie Dog stands on its hindlegs in Glacier National Park, near Logan Pass. Prairie Dogs (Cynomys spp) are a type of ground squirrel.
One of the last remnants of tallgrass prairie vegetation in the state of Missouri. Prairie once covered at least 1/4 of the state, now only a few hundred acres of intact prairie are left.
Sunset over the prairie near Red Deer AB. Location on the map is approximate- one piece of prairie tends to look a lot like another.
Designed in 1908-1909 and built in 1909-1910, this Prairie-style house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Frederick C. Robie, assistant manager of the Excelsior Supply Company, and his wife, Lora Hieronymus Robie, a 1900 graduate of the University of Chicago who aspired to become the owner and operator of a Kindergarten. Built by the H.B. Barnard Co., the house was the last to be designed in the Chicago area during Frank Lloyd Wright’s period of residency in Oak Park, before he relocated to Taliesin the year following the completion of the house. The house was the home of the Robie family for only fourteen months before marital and financial difficulties forced them to sell the house, and it was acquired by David Lee Taylor, president of the Taylor-Critchfield Company, an advertising agency, and his wife, Ellen Taylor. The Taylors only lived in the house for just over a year prior to David Lee Taylor’s death, after which Ellen sold it to Marshall D. Wilber, treasurer of the Wilber Mercantile Agency, and the house remained the home of the Wilber family for the next 14 years.
The Wilber family moved out in the summer of 1926, selling the house to the nearby Chicago Theological Seminary, whom utilized the house as a dormitory and dining hall, eventually intending to replace the house with a new purpose-built building, a plan that was put on hold for decades by the Great Depression and World War II. In 1957, the Seminary finally put into motion the plans to demolish the house to replace it with a new dormitory and dining hall facility, which elicited outcry from the architectural community, including an appeal from Frank Lloyd Wright, whom showed up with protestors at the age of 90 to decry the impeding demolition of one of his masterworks. Eventually, a deal was reached with two adjacent fraternities to sell the land upon which their houses sat to the seminary in order to save the Robie House, and the dormitory and dining hall facility was subsequently constructed to the north of the house. The house was acquired by William Zeckendorf, a personal friend of Wright’s and proprietor of development company Webb and Knapp, whom donated the house to the University of Chicago in 1963, ensuring the preservation of the house. The house served as the Adlai E. Stevenson Institute of International Affairs in the 1960s, and later the home of the school’s Alumni foundation. In 1997, university offices were moved out of the house, and it was opened to the public as a museum.
The house features a steel and masonry structure, which affords an open interior floor plan and a highly transparent facade, which allows for ample views out of the house, while maintaining privacy. The house, like other houses of Wright’s Prairie School, features a low-pitch hipped roof with broad overhanging eaves, ribbon art glass windows, exterior terraces and porches, and concrete planters. The house is clad in red roman brick with limestone trim, and has heavy horizontal emphasis in its design. The front entrance is recessed from the street at the rear of a courtyard on the north side of the front facade, while the south facade features a courtyard and three-car garage at the east end of the house, an almost unheard of feature in 1910. The interior of the house features woodwork, custom brass and wood wall sconces, custom furniture, art glass doors, brick fireplaces, tiled bathrooms, a needle shower in the master bathroom, and large amounts of natural light.
The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1963, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. The house was further designated as a Chicago Landmark in 1971, and was one of eight Frank Lloyd Wright buildings that comprise The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright World Heritage Site, designated by UNESCO in 2019. Today, the house, after undergoing a significant restoration between 2002 and 2019, is owned by the University of Chicago, and stewarded and operated as a museum by the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust.
Part of my "Prairie Geometry" phase. I was attracted to the feeling of endless stars within circles reflecting the feeling of endless prairie.
Discussed at TYWKIWDBI -
tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2009/07/prairie-white-fringed-orch...
Photographed this morning at Scuppernong Prairie State Natural Area. This is a stately (almost 3 foot tall), beautiful, but endangered plant. This orchid was native to Midwestern wet prairies, but much of its habitat has been lost to agriculture; it is now estimated that there may be as few as 400 plants remaining in Wisconsin.
Note in the photo not just the delicate petals, but also the 2-inch-long nectar tube descending behind the blossom. Obviously it has coevolved with some pollinator with an impressively long proboscis - probably a moth (the proboscis of sphinx moth can be as long as ten inches!).