BROADACRE CITY

Project (unbuilt) by Frank Lloyd Wright
Following his innovative Prairie houses of the previous decades, Broadacre City
permitted Frank Lloyd Wright to pursue the subject of a new American urbanism. The
opportunity for this remarkable plan was provided initially by an invitation to present the
1930 Kahn Lectures at Princeton University. After a decade of personal trials and
professional inactivity and with the economic depression increasingly pressing, Wright
knew that these lectures could provide an opportunity for regeneration. In those sections
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 322
devoted to the city, he presented no specific layout or architectural parts. Instead, he
negatively exposed the physical and social state of present cities; they were ugly,
congested, dirty, badly administered, and an economic disaster. Wright’s solutions were,
however, mired in emotion mixed by awkwardly unclear language. Yet the vision of
Broadacre City was described in all but name. His comments match those in his
autobiography, written at the same time and for the same reason.
For the autobiography, Wright wrote a concluding section about Broadacre, but the
publisher rejected it. Wright then had it produced as a pamphlet titled The Dis appearing City. The first half
contained philosophical reasons for change and an accounting of present ills, organized
under five headings: economic (drawn from the analytical and curative ideas of Henry
George); suppression of human individuality; urban concentrations and the inhuman
vertical city; the failure to embrace modern resources (for example, telecommunications,
mechanical systems, and new building materials); and chaotic automobile traffic.
The last half of Dis appearing City offered some rather inexact proposals for rectification, all to be
activated by adhering to George’s social and economic observations and promotion of the
individual as the dominant factor in opposition to collectivism and the dominating
authorities of government and church. If causes and effects were properly understood and
cures attended, a fresh morality and new urban and rural space would follow, joined by a
new aesthetic, Broadacre City.
An article in American Architect briefly outlined some of Wright’s thoughts from Dis appearing City. Illustrated with a
fuzzy aerial view sketched in charcoal (not by Wright), it showed roads, major highways,
and a few isolated buildings on a rather desolate landscape. The text indicated some
determinants for Broadacre, including “plane-stations” and the use of highways for “take
off.” Wright did not mention how his city might be physically laid out, but one detail to
reappear was that “farm units and factories that produce [?] are within a ten mile radius…
of each market and within walking distance of home and the workers.” That radius fit the
location of “plane-stations” every 20 miles.
The New York Ti mes Magazine published an article in 1932 about Le Corbusier’s architectonic
Ville Radieuse. Many readers were aware of Wright’s antagonism toward
what he saw as the growing hegemonic influence of Europe’s socialistic
modernism. Wright followed the Le Corbusier piece with an article titled
“Broadacre City: An Architect’s Vision,” in which he again attacked
centrally clustered skyscrapers (places of both work and home, he
reminded) as foolish and unnatural and said that villages harmoniously
close to the land were preferred: “Ruralism as distinguished from Urbanisme”
Broadacre City remained a verbal, nontectonic concept until November 1934, when Tom
Maloney in New York City arranged to exhibit a model of a possible city. Wright
prepared a plan in late 1934 intended to accommodate about 4,000 people, and this plan
was published the following year. This served as the basis of plans prepared in 1945 and
1958. It was a suggestive layout for an imaginary site, perhaps typical, realizing that each
actual city/village would respond to its unique physical environment. A 12-foot-square
model, large display panels with illustrations and text, and a number of models of
possible buildings were mounted at Rockefeller Center in April-May 1935 and then at
Madison, Wisconsin; in Pittsburgh; and at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.
The organizational device of a cruciform derived from a square gave the plan an
obvious coherence. Defined by roads and functional zones, the cruciform was used as
spatial geometry. The smallest element was a rectangular acre, but the design itself was
organized by a square composed of 40 (8 by 5) acres, such as that for the circular
stadium, or two squares at area 2 or four squares at area 4.
Housing was the heart of Broadacre—“Minimum of one acre to the family”—and
constituted the large central square with schools at the center. Therefore, tall buildings
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 324
(including apartments) were not clustered but rather were dispersed on the periphery.
Other major areas included arts, recreational facilities, and county administration located
at A; markets, other recreations, and little farms at B; orchards and “small” industry at C;
and housing and higher education (and a cemetery) at D. In the cruciform’s corners were
nonfarm (“luxurious”) housing at e and “games” and other administration at f. Juxtaposed
to regional rail lines and a raised four-lane highway (with storage underneath) were
distribution activities related to commerce, manufacturing, and industry, at g, C, and h,
respectively.
Generally, the Broadacre concept was one of self-sustaining communities surrounded
by nature preserves and rural agriculture, each linked regionally by transport systems.
Predecessors included Arturo Soria y Mata’s Linear City (1882 and later), Ebenezer
Howard’s Garden City (1898 and later), and William Drummond’s Neighborhood Unit
(1913). More in line with American sensibilities was Frederick Law Olmsted’s plan
(1868 and later, with Calvert Vaux) for Riverside, Illinois, a place known and admired by
Wright, as were Olmsted’s views about the city (it need not be synonymous with “an
unhealthy density of population”), about house and home (“the advantages of
‘civilization’ were perhaps best realized in suburban neighborhoods”), and on Nature
ideally typified by landscape and private gardens.
Although Wright had been influenced by writers, nonconformists, and philosophers
ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thorsten Veblen, the practical Henry Ford was
the immediate influence on Wright’s ideas for Broadacre. The two men agreed that such
innovations as the automobile, the airplane, and the radio were potent indicators of
freedom, capable of freeing up time from work and creating a new kind of social space.
To Wright, Ford epitomized a properly administered capitalism, American pragmatism,
gumption, verve, and a means to social change.
In 1918 Ford had said, “I am a farmer…. I want to see every acre of the earth’s surface
covered with little farms with happy, contented people living on them,” and close to little
markets. In 1919 he had said, “Plainly…the ultimate solution will be the abolition of the
City…. We shall solve the City problem by leaving the City.” Recognized as a
pragmatist, Ford always put theory into practice and weighed the results. He proposed
that regional car and tractor parts “manufacturing” plants be “within easy reach of
farming districts,” a series of village industries. One energetically pursued plan was the
construction of a large scheme at Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee River, but that private
enterprise was rejected by the federal government. In 1932 President Roosevelt
announced a tax-supported program for the multipurpose development of the Tennessee
Valley. It was similar to Ford’s proposal, only more comprehensive and considerably
larger. Ford’s idea of village industries was reiterated in May 1932, also in the New York Times Magazine; it
followed Wright’s article on Broadacre.
Wright was clear about Ford’s influence, noting that Muscle Shoals would have
decentralized industry and given “every man a few acres of ground.” When Wright
introduced Broadacre City in 1932 in American Architect, he titled it “Today…Tomorrow.” Ford’s book Today and Tomo rrow
(1926) described the integration of industry and agriculture. It reads as a primer for
Wright’s ideas on modern villages, the work ethic, unionism, effectiveness and
productivity, and much more, but not economics. Wright did not favor the plutocratic
impulse of American capitalism.
Inspired by Ford, Walter V.Davidson offered a practical application, commissioning
Wright in late 1931 to design prefabricated sheet-metal farm buildings composed of a
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 326
house separated by an airlock from a composite farm facility to be called a“Little Farms
Unit.” Davidson also asked for the design of “Wayside Markets” where the produce of
little farms—and from elsewhere—would be available at roadside. Made possible by
inexpensive cars, the idea pre-dates the modern shopping center. A service, social, and
administrative center was to be a “Little-Farms” village, laid out by Wright to contain
many normal city functions. Nothing came of these commissions, but they preceded or
paralleled Wright’s comments later in 1932 and predicted aspects of the 1934–35 plan
and related text.
The Broadacre City concept was meant to reinforce, by reinterpretation, the
Jeffersonian tradition of a rural society sustained by Emersonian virtues and to encourage
returning to a democratically endowed village life in modern geometric form and
functional character. Broadacre was to be scattered about the landscape, integrated “along
the horizontal lines” of highway and rail, with people free of capital gains tax but owning
“utilities and government” and a right to “fair means of subsistence” from “their own
ground,” laboratory, or “common offices.” However, as historian George Collins
correctly observed, in the 1930s “the world was not electrified by Wright’s agrarianism.”
Broadacre City is not a theory. It does not contain a body of ideas or a set of terms that
can be rationally measured—a treatise, yes, but not a utopia, nor was it conceived as
such. Lyman Sargent’s reasonable specification (in British and American Utopian Literature, 1516–1985, 1988) is that a utopia must
describe “fairly completely an imaginary society,” a nowhere. Therefore, Broadacre is
not included in his compendium. As the last radical reaction to the horrors (as Wright saw
the situation) imposed on cities in the 19th century by a rapacious process of
centralization, Broadacre City is a provocative decentralist proposition that—if faintly—
still teases urbanists.