Architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, proposed in the 1930s, was both technologically forward-looking and socially nostalgic. The development concept revived an 18th-century political project that seemingly advanced widespread landownership, but was exclusionary in practice. Motivated by the possibilities of the automobile and mass electrification, Wright recommended that urban populations relocate to single-acre plots in the countryside, where they would be connected by a network of highways, telephones, and radios. His dream of a technological countryside stands at odds with the notion that the metropolis must be the center of progress.
Although never actualized, Broadacre City largely identified the decentralizing effects of new transportation and communication technologies. From Edward Hopper’s painting of a gas station to Lester Beall’s posters advocating for rural electrification, the works of Wright’s contemporaries on view here likewise grapple with the changes wrought by dispersal. This reckoning is no less pressing today, with energy-intensive, automobile-dependent suburban sprawl now dominant throughout the world.
Organized by Carson Chan, Director, the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and Natural Environment, and Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, with Matthew Wagstaffe, Ambasz Institute Research Assistant, Dewi Tan, former Ambasz Institute Research Assistant, Eva Lavranou, former Ambasz Institute 12-Month Intern, and Rachel Remick, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture.
