One on One: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City

Three years after the publication of The Disappearing City, Frank Lloyd Wright unveiled a spectacular 12-by-12-foot (3.6-square-meter) relief model of Broadacre City, to illustrate how four square miles (6.4 square kilometers) of “typical” countryside might be settled by 1,400 families. This tour de force has come to stand for a complex and largely impractical project, never to be built. Flowing over the imaginary landscape and laid out in harmony with its natural contours is a patchwork of small-scale homesteads, farms, and factories connected by roads (including one of the earliest schemes for a highway flyover) and linked to embedded parks and community facilities. The model’s diagrammatic, interwoven patterns—reminiscent of a carpet design or a computer motherboard—powerfully communicate the connectivity and horizontal spread of Wright’s new urbanism. The best way to get the full thrill of Broadacre City, suggested the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1935, is to stand by the relief model and “imagine yourself motoring, coming upon it by surprise. Your car will be—on the same scale—about as large as a rice grain.... You would slow down, turn off the road and idle through the streets...of this city, at once as practical as the ugliest parking space in Manhattan and as handsome as an architect’s watercolor of a country estate. Before you left you would almost certainly ask how to become a resident.”¹

Frank Lloyd Wright. Broadacre City relief model. Installation view of Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014

Promoted and updated throughout the last phase of Wright’s life, the model toured the country for several years in the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression, beginning with a display at New York’s Rockefeller Center in 1935. In these exhibitions the maquette and additional models of Broadacre components were accompanied by slogans and didactic wall panels [see below] that helped visitors to identify the project’s core ideas and imagine how the different building types might function in a local neighborhood. In egalitarian Broadacre, every family was to have a radio, a telephone, at least one car, and access to clean solar and electric energy. Technological advances in the development of machinery, transportation, and telecommunications were not to be monopolized by profit-hungry speculators and big businesses in centralized cities, but applied at a local level in support of the productive individual and the common good, balancing “the welfare of one and the welfare of the whole.”²

Exhibition display panel (one of two dedicated to “organic architecture”), with a key to buildings in the Broadacre City relief model. 1934–35. Painted plywood

The model’s visually compelling iteration of Broadacre City was lovingly constructed—and later adapted and repaired—by groups of architectural apprentices who came to live and work alongside Wright at the Taliesin estate in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and subsequently at Taliesin West in Arizona. This educational scheme, known as the Taliesin Fellowship, was established in 1932; it ran concurrently with the Broadacre City project, which remained an idée fixe for Wright until his death in 1959. The Taliesin apprentices assisted their master in refining his ideas for Broadacre through a steady flow of experimental models, drawings, publications, and exhibitions.

Broadacre City was not so much a fixed template for a defined location as a polemical demonstration of possibilities that could embrace “all of this country.” It existed, Wright said, “everywhere, or nowhere”—a utopia in the original sense of the ancient Greek word: a “non-place.”³ In the absence of restrictive budgets or interference from actual clients and legislative authorities, Wright gave free rein to his imagination, designing a future in which the architect ruled supreme. Arguably, it took someone of his international stature and notoriously giant ego to attempt to resettle an entire nation.

Frank Lloyd Wright inspecting the Broadacre City relief model, 1935. Avery Archival Collection

Frank Lloyd Wright. Broadacre City Project (Model in four sections). 1934–35. Painted wood, cardboard, and paper

“There is already no question that Wright is one of the great architects of all time,” wrote architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock in 1932 (an estimation with which Wright evidently concurred).⁴ The architect’s reputation at this point rested on earlier achievements at the forefront of what was known as the Prairie Style, a Midwestern manifestation of the international Arts and Crafts movement. The radical open-plan and ground-hugging forms of his Frederick C. Robie House in Chicago (1908–10) brought this style to a climax, revealing new possibilities of expansive modern living. It also demonstrated Wright’s conception of “organic” design: integrating buildings and landscape, assimilating new technologies, stripping away superfluous ornamentation, and harmoniously organizing all parts within the whole, according to structure, material, and purpose. Broadacre City was to become an important platform for the development of this design philosophy, in making clear “an organic form for the Democratic city of the American future.”⁵

Frank Lloyd Wright. Model of Frederick C. Robie House, Chicago, Illinois. Building, 1908–10. Model by G. Loyd Barnum, c. 1938. Wood, cardboard, and paint

Yet by 1932 Wright’s career was unraveling. At the age of 65, he was hunkered down in rural Wisconsin—isolated, teetering on insolvency, and in desperate need of commissions and critical attention. His dire situation was not helped by the reputational damage incurred a few years earlier, with his public and messy divorce from his second wife, Miriam Noel, preceding his marriage to Olgivanna Ivanovna Lazović in 1928. Broadacre City was the big idea on which he now staked a professional comeback and the revival of his fortunes.

Want to read more? Pick up a copy of Frank Lloyd Wright: Broadacre City in the One on One series.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City model is currently on view in Gallery 519: The City May Now Scatter.