ARCHITECTURAL WORLD

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 comment...

Designed by Colin St. John Wilson; completed 1998 London, England The British Library is arguably the most significant and controversial 20th-century public building in London, equal in importance to Sir Williams Chambers’s Somerset House in the 18th century and Charles Barry and A.W.N.Pugin’s Houses of Parliament in the 19th century, and the largest public building commissioned in the 20th century. In terms of its centrality as an institution, urbanistic visibility and impact, cost (£511 million, contrasted with £400 million for Norman Foster’s Stansted Airport Outside London, and £35.5 million for the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, London, 1990), size, length of gestation and realization, programmatic complexity, and architectural uniqueness, the British Library has no contemporary rivals. Its designer, the erudite Colin St. John Wilson (who earned a knighthood on its completion) enjoys a professional history non-pareil in modern Britain, comparable only to those 19th-centur...