Broadacre City

Broadacre City is a city layout concept developed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who was an influential American architect in the first half of the 20^th century. Wright was largely ambivalent about dense cities. While he worked on some of the most important building in New York City, such as the Guggenheim Museum, he also envisioned that dense cities were obsolete given the advancement in technologies, most notably automobiles and telephones. His concept of Broadacre City would give each family one acre of land in the countryside. In 1935, Wright unveiled his detailed plan on a 12 ft x 12 ft model representing a community. It was ironically presented at New York’s Rockefeller Center, the antithesis of what Broadacre City called for.

Proposed during the Great Depression, Broadacre City reflected the social and economic uncertainty facing the country at the time. In his 1932 book The Disappearing City, Wright wrote of the “comfort” of wide spaces and that people of the future “will have all forms of production, distribution, self improvement, enjoyment, within a radius of a hundred and fifty miles of his home now easily and speedily available by means of his car or plane.”Wright’s Broadacre City called for pockets of community centers or small manufacturing centers, which were all necessities for society, but they would all be spread out. Roads would be the crucial artery linking the decentralized settlement. Inter-dispersed throughout the community would be single-family homes. Some of Wright’s ideas ultimately took shape in the form of the suburban sprawl observed in the United States after World War II, and for that reason Wright is aptly labeled as the prophet of suburbia. But it was the organized and planned nature of the development that separated Broadacre City and actual developments.

Even during the initial release in the 1930s, Wright faced much criticism for his Broadacre City layout proposal. Even before the days of environmentalism that have since followed, people back then called his plan largely wasteful. Today, many urban centers are seeking to reverse the effects of suburban sprawl that took effect in much of the country in the latter half of 20^th century. While Wright’s original model had called for “No traffic problems” thanks to the decentralization of the city, ironically one of the most negative consequence of the suburban sprawl has been traffic congestion and environmental degradation.

Sources:

• http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/frank-lloyd-wrights-utopian-dystopia
• Museum of Modern Art, Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal