What Frank Lloyd Wright Got Wrong about the Country

In 1920, for the first time in the history of the United States, the majority of the country’s population lived in cities. For architect Frank Lloyd Wright, this was not something to be celebrated. Surveying the contemporary metropolis, Wright saw little that met his approval: Its traffic-filled streets were “congested” and “intolerable,” and the “pretended means of relief” for this overcrowding—the skyscraper—only compounded the problem, bringing even more people into the city. Moreover, these skyscrapers, he contended, were “utterly barbaric,” with no “consideration for [their] environment.”¹

In Wright’s eyes, the dominance of urban centers would not last long: “The city, as we know it today,” he speculated in the early 1930s, “is to die.”² Cutting-edge technologies were to be the means of its demise. If the railroads of the 19th century tended to concentrate populations in the central cities where branch lines converged, the automobile and electrical network of the 20th century, in Wright’s imagination, would lead to these cities’ dispersal. With the “ubiquitous mobilization” brought about by the car and the “instantaneous communication” enabled by the telephone, information and goods could be exchanged with equal efficiency across great distances, freeing the US populace to spread out across the country’s vast landscape.³

Wright not only welcomed this hypothetical migration, he sought to design it. At the 1935 National Alliance of Arts and Industry Exposition at Rockefeller Center, he unveiled a massive, 12-foot-by-12-foot model of a proposed development that he called “Broadacre City.” A city in name only, Broadacre lacked the central boulevards and densely packed high-rises of a typical metropolis. Also absent were a city’s gargantuan distribution warehouses, outlying factory complexes, and centralized shopping districts. Instead, a nonhierarchical grid of roads crisscrossed the model. Within this patchwork Wright distributed all the functions of a city largely in the form of spread out, low-lying buildings. The model represented four square miles of a roughly 36-square-mile territory; Broadacre City–scale counties were eventually to be extended across the entire country. In Wright’s imagination, nearly all urban inhabitants would be relocated to this highway-gridded landscape and be given an acre or more of property “according to [their] ability to use the land.”⁴

Once in the countryside, citizens would either work on their farms or, part-time, at small-scale factories. To circulate the resulting goods without disruption, Wright designed multilane highway interchanges and placed, at approximately 10-mile intervals, regional-scale roadside markets with stalls laid out to make the selling of wares as efficient as possible. In contrast to the traffic-clogged metropolis, he argued that, in Broadacre, “[d]istribution becomes automatic and direct.”

Wright was seeking to rectify more than congested city streets: ultimately, Broadacre was a remedy for what he saw as the over-concentration of money and power in a small number of corporations. Having grown up spending summers on his grandfather’s farm—a small, self-owned business complete with its own gristmill—Wright had come to idealize the land-owning, small-enterprise capitalist. “The family unit in a Democracy,” he would argue with near-Jeffersonian ardor, “is the strength of that Democracy, and in its integrity and beauty lies whatever future this great nation is to enjoy.”⁵

But by the 1930s, when Wright was proposing Broadacre, such small-scale enterprises had been diminished due to the rise of what some have called the age of “corporate capitalism.”⁶ During this period, rather than relying on owner-operators to oversee each specialized component of the economic process (like sourcing, production, or distribution), industrial firms brought these activities in house. In the memorable phrasing of business historian Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., the economy ceased to run by the ostensible “invisible hand” of the market and instead was organized by the “visible hand” of corporate managers.⁷

With the postal system making it possible to sell one’s goods across the entire United States, manufacturers began to build their own retailing and marketing outfits, further enlarging the purview of the white collar worker. This gave rise to a whole new social stratum—the “professional managerial class.”⁸ Its members included not only the new army of administrative employees but also specialists in financial and legal services required by these large-scale, capital-intensive operations. While these bureaucratic employees were paid more than their working-class counterparts, they too had no ownership stake in the companies built from their labor.

For Wright, this concentration of property in the hands of the few was a disastrous development. Relying on the example of his grandfather, he believed that land ownership granted an individual independence and dignity that the “wage-slaves” and “white collar army” of the cities lacked. Seen from this point of view, Wright’s outsized loathing of the urban high-rise makes sense: the first skyscrapers were built to house the office workers he saw as “parasites [that]…live upon origins but never live by originating.”⁹

From the perspective of architectural history, Wright’s animosity to urban vastness may have been in opposition to prevailing trends—the historian Neil Levine has positioned Broadacre as a response to the towers-in-the-garden urbanism spearheaded by Le Corbusier. But Wright was not alone in his ambition to redistribute the over-concentrated riches of the metropolis back to those living in the countryside. The public intellectual Herbert Agar, author of the anti-corporate screed Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence, and the back-to-the-lander Ralph Borsodi, whose Flight from the City: An Experiment in Creative Living on the Land provided city-dwellers with a blueprint for building a subsistence homestead in the countryside, were among the many thinkers of the time who called for a revival of the Jeffersonian project of a land-owning citizenry. Often labeled “decentralists,” these pundits saw new technologies as the key to making this possible in the modern age. In language that could have come from Wright’s pen, Agar argued that “freedom can exist only in societies in which the great majority are the effective owners of tangible and productive property”¹⁰ and that this self-determination can only be precipitated “with the help…of every conceivable gadget of modern machinery.”¹¹

Despite the anti-corporate, populist position of these intellectuals, their project was capitalist through and through. Their goal was to disperse, not collectivize, the means of production. Wright himself was explicit on this point: “Where the sovereignty of the individual is impinged upon by collectivism, by socialism,” he wrote, “you are in trouble.”¹²

Specifically, Wright advocated for an economic system that he called “organic capitalism.” In Broadacre, the proper role of government was not ensuring equality but equality of opportunity. Once government had granted each head of household an amount of property dependent upon their ability to use the land, and once distribution had been made “automatic and direct” via the construction of Wright-designed highway interchanges and roadside markets, its role was over. The magic of the reined-in market would do the rest.

The decentralists’ vision looks rather less progressive when placed within the larger context of American history. The project of granting land to individuals based on their ability to make it productive has a troubling heritage. Along with disease and violence, the imposition of property titles was how European settlers colonized America. When they arrived on these shores, they brought with them a conception of private property indebted to the theories of the Enlightenment thinker John Locke.

According to Locke, the earth was held in common, and private claims to territory were justified only when one “mixed” one’s labor with the land, making it more productive by tilling the soil and planting and cultivating crops. But what constitutes a nature-improving act is very much in the eye of the beholder, and Locke’s definition was selectively discerning: “The fruit, or venison” which the “wild Indian” has expended his labor to gather was rightfully his, but because Native Americans “[knew] no inclosure” they had not, in his estimation, improved the land and could make no property claims upon it. In other words, because Indigenous people rarely fenced in land, Locke—and by extension the arriving settlers—were able to see the country as unsettled and legally claim it as their own.¹³

Hundreds of years later, Wright invoked this colonialist framework in sketching out his reasons for embarking on Broadacre City. The “American people,” he argued, were granted “a great unspoiled ground…the Indians did not spoil it. We were fortunate. They were nomads. We didn’t have any wreckage to clear away. We got the whole country.”¹⁴ For Wright, the ownerless expanse he imagined was the precondition for the founding of the United States:

This nation [was] conceived in liberty where all men were to have equal opportunity before the law; where vast territory, riches untouched, were inherited by all the breeds of the earth desiring freedom and courageous enough to come and take domain on the terms of the pioneer.¹⁵

The automobile-enabled revival of this pioneer ethos was likewise only possible given what he still saw as a vast and empty American interior.

Wright shows his indebtedness to this earlier history not only as rhetoric; Broadacre also exhibits this heritage in its form. Wright borrowed Broadacre’s dimensions from the surveying grid of the Land Ordinance of 1785, an act passed by Congress—largely under the influence of Thomas Jefferson—that partitioned the country’s Northwest Territory into gridded lots for ease of sale to settlers emigrating west. Eventually, the government would extend this grid to cover nearly 70 percent of the contiguous US. In advocating for filling the country with countless Broadacre developments, Wright sought to complete a territorialization project that began nearly at the birth of the American republic.

What should we make of Broadacre’s hodgepodge of manifest destiny, “organic capitalism,” and absolute faith in the virtue of the individual landowner? For one, we should not relegate it to a distant past. We are again living at a time when wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small number of powerful corporations, and a populist movement advocating for a return to a mythical past of prosperity and innocence dominates the political scene. Broadacre City’s blind spots remind us that it is only possible to imagine earlier eras of American history as utopias by selectively erasing the inequalities and dispossessions upon which they were built.

While we can applaud Wright for his desire to right the wrongs of monopoly power—and for his ambitious attempt, in this pursuit, to redesign not just built space but the entire political economy—we must be wary of the wrongs he chose to not only ignore but to re-enact. For all of his ambition to rethink the basics of American society, he accepted the myth of the virtuous pioneer in its entirety. Alongside the harm enacted by corporate power, myths of American innocence and excellence have caused their own copious injuries. Perhaps it is time to make the righting of those wrongs our collective design project.

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