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Mr. Wright and the Disappearing City

Frank Lloyd Wright is not mentioned in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but his influence on American urbanism was at least as important as that of the Radiant Garden City Beautiful. Wright first broached the subject of urbanism in the late spring of 1930, when he was invited to deliver the Kahn Lectures at Princeton University. After five lectures that covered architecture, technology, style, housing, and skyscrapers, he devoted the final talk to “The City.” What he said would have surprised his audience. “I believe the city as we know it today, is to die,” he asserted, listing the various technologies—airplanes, automobiles, telephones, radio—that were encouraging people to spread out.1 He anticipated the impact of television, although it was then in its infancy. “The ‘movies,’ ‘talkies’ and all, will soon be seen and heard better at home than in any hall. Symphony concerts, operas and lectures will eventually be taken more easily to the home than the people there can be taken to the great halls in old style, and be heard more satisfactorily in congenial company. The home of the individual social unit will contain in itself in this respect all the city heretofore could afford, plus intimate comfort and free individual choice.”2 Wright did not provide any specific details of what would replace the traditional city, but he was adamant about one thing: the future would in no way resemble “Le Corbusier and his school.”³

Not long after, Wright confronted Le Corbusier’s ideas head-on. On January 3, 1932, the New York Times Magazine published a critique of American urbanism under the heading “A Noted Architect Dissects Our Cities”—the author was Le Corbusier. While conceding that the United States was leading the world in modern technology, and despite never having set foot in an American city (his first visit occurred three years later), Le Corbusier was unbending in his judgment: “I absolutely refuse to admit, nevertheless, as many so lightly do, that Manhattan and Chicago possess the architecture and town planning of modern times. No, and again no!”⁴ The article was illustrated with an aerial view of the Voisin Plan and preached the virtues of tall buildings surrounded by greenery. His views on suburbs had hardened. “This new city will be the reverse of the garden city, fundamentally opposed to it in principle. Since the garden city is situated in the suburbs and so extends the area of the town, it creates a transport problem, but as the green city will reduce the town area this problem will be done away with entirely.” In case there was any doubt, he added, “We must immediately discard the traditional type of house.”⁵ Since the majority of Americans lived in single-family houses—in cities as well as suburbs—this was a calculated provocation.

Less than three months later, the New York Times Magazine published Wright’s response under the headline “Broadacre City: An Architect’s Vision.” It is unclear whether Wright was invited to write the article, or whether, as he often did with the press, he volunteered. Probably the latter, for he was irritated by the attention being lavished on European architects. A month earlier, the Museum of Modern Art had opened its Modern Architecture exhibition, and although Wright’s work was included, the focus was firmly on the work of the European modernists, whose work the exhibition’s organizers christened the International Style.6 The New York Times article was a chance for Wright to regain the limelight.

Wright had favorably reviewed the English translation of Vers une architecture four years earlier, but his Times essay is a spirited point-by-point rebuttal of Le Corbusier’s urban theories.⁷ Wright reiterates his view that the concentrated city has been rendered obsolete by modern technologies such as the automobile and telecommunications. People can spread out—they no longer need to live in dense concentrations. “Centralization by way of the city has had a big day and a long day. It is not dead yet. But it is no longer a necessity or a luxury,” he writes. “And 1,000 people to the hectare [a reference to the urban density that Le Corbusier proposed in his article] . . . is 980 too many.”⁸ While Le Corbusier wanted to bring nature into the city in the form of parks, Wright suggests the exact opposite; take the city into the countryside, he advises. Expanding his Princeton lecture, he describes people shopping in roadside markets, working on farms and in factories, and living in individual houses that are spread out over the landscape and linked by a network of highways. Wright was vague about the details of this decentralized city and included no plans or drawings, but he did give it a name: Broadacre City.*

Where did Broadacre City come from? Wright was sixty-five when he wrote the New York Times article, fully twenty years older than Le Corbusier. He belonged to an earlier generation and had the reputation of being a romantic, yet his ideas about urbanism, unlike those of the European architect, were grounded in direct observation. While Le Corbusier had been living in Paris dreaming about cities of skyscrapers, Wright had been experiencing his vision of urbanism firsthand—in Los Angeles. In the early 1920s, he spent several years living and working in the city, which was then one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, and growing in ways that made it different from any other city in the world. Though not particularly large in terms of population—about half a million—the city was spread over seventy miles. For Wright, who had previously lived in the dense Chicago suburbs, and who loved driving, cruising the boulevards and drives of Los Angeles was an eye-opener.

The public exchange with Le Corbusier stimulated Wright to publish a short book titled The Disappearing City.⁹ In it he elaborated on the themes of his Princeton lecture and Times article and elucidated a key principle: “We are going to call this city for the individual the Broadacre City because it is based upon a minimum of an acre to the family.”¹⁰ In Wright’s scheme, which was influenced by the theories of the maverick economist Henry George, each individual would receive an acre of land in a vast redistribution scheme, “opening the way for him to be a better citizen in a better country.”11 Although The Disappearing City did not include any plans, Wright provided detailed written descriptions of Broadacre City, in many cases referring to his earlier designs for apartment buildings, hotels, and houses. Catherine Bauer, a planner and housing advocate writing in the Nation, found his proposal to be Utopian and impractical.¹² The New York Times Book Review, however, was more positive: “Economists are already looking around for the industry which will lift us out of the depression. Housing in urban regions seems a poor agent for this task because of the high cost of land and the existence of ‘dead areas’ and what might be called dead buildings. But housing on land which is cheap because it is outside the cities, carried out by methods and materials which technology already has at its command, might be a different story. One would like to see architects of Mr. Wright’s social view point entrusted with such an experiment.”¹³

During the winter of 1934–35, Wright, with the financial support of Edgar J. Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department-store magnate for whom he was designing a weekend house (the soon-to-be-famous Fallingwater), gave Broadacre City physical form. As Le Corbusier had done with “A Contemporary City of Three Million Inhabitants,” Wright imagined a hypothetical site: four square miles of vaguely Midwestern topography including farmland, a portion of a river, and a section of hillside. Following Midwestern custom, a grid of roads divides the land into quarter sections; some of the roads are two-level highways, cars above and trucks below, with specially designed interchanges (limited-access highways were still a novelty). There is no functional zoning; instead, schools, civic buildings, factories, a county seat, and an arena are scattered among orchards, vineyards, farms, and recreational spaces. People live in houses on acre lots, as well as in apartment towers and on small farms. Wright’s idea of a substitute for the traditional city is much more radical than Le Corbusier’s proposal and differs from it in two important respects. First, there is no center or commercial core, nothing that resembles a traditional downtown, no architectural focus at all. Second, Wright’s plan does not represent a complete city; it is merely a small portion of an urban pattern that can go on forever. Since the four square miles represented by the plan would have housed a population of only seven thousand, to accommodate 3 million people would have required seventeen hundred square miles, that is, thirty times the area of Le Corbusier’s Contemporary City, but smaller than metropolitan Seattle, which has a comparable population spread over 5,894 square miles.*

Broadacre City was unveiled to the public in 1935 at the monthlong Industrial Arts Exposition held in New York’s Rockefeller Center. The display included plans and drawings and a giant twelve-foot-square model. Wright continued to tinker with this model for the next two and a half decades and published two more books on Broadacre City: in 1945, When Democracy Builds, a further elaboration of The Disappearing City; and the year before he died, The Living City. The latter is heavily illustrated with drawings and models of buildings: prefabricated houses, fireproof farmhouses, schools, and service stations. Despite futuristic touches such as flying-saucer-like helicopter taxis and odd-looking cars of his own design, Wright insists that his vision of the future is not Utopian. “There is plenty of evidence now at hand to substantiate all the changes I outline,” he writes in a section titled “Democracy in Overalls.”14

Broadacre City was a vision of a highly decentralized urban future, with private flying machines and strip malls.

Except for a couple of small subdivisions, Wright never built even a small version of Broadacre City, and neither did anyone else for, unlike the City Beautiful and the Garden City, Broadacre City did not spawn a movement. Wright was too little the organizer, and too much the individualist, for that. Another problem was that admirers of his architecture, who were legion, generally found his urban vision unpalatable, if not downright embarrassing. “One cannot but give pause to a few questions which suggest themselves,” wrote a reviewer of The Disappearing City. “Would so complete a lack of community organization be amenable to the inhabitants? Is not man naturally a gregarious animal? What will become of the beauty of the countryside, once it becomes webbed with giant highways and flecked with super—filling stations?”15 Mumford was likewise skeptical: “Frank Lloyd Wright’s scheme for Broadacre City, in which each family would have a minimum of one acre of land, limits social intercourse on the primary level to a mere handful of neighbors and above that level demands motor transportation for even the most casual or ephemeral meetings.”¹⁶

Although Wright never built a version of Broadacre City, as architectural historian David De Long observes, everything that the architect designed in his later years can be seen as contributing toward his urban vision. Wright populated the great model with tiny examples of his own buildings, “each a demonstration of principle, each conceived to uphold his ideal of organic architecture, each meant to sustain a sense of individual freedom, each shaped to enhance human life through meaningful connection, each conceived as a visible part of a universal order,” De Long writes.¹⁷

One aspect of the Broadacre idea that Wright did realize was the individual family house. In 1936, shortly after he unveiled the model of his proposed city, Wright began building the first in a series of houses that he called Usonians, the sort of small, affordable homes that were the staple of Broadacre City. He published the designs in popular magazines such as House and Home and House Beautiful, and the houses’ distinctive features—one-story layouts, low roofs, carports, kitchens overlooking living areas, and rough stone fireplaces—soon showed up in so-called ranch houses built by ordinary builders. Between 1935 and his death in 1959, Wright built more than 150 Usonians, and his idea of living in houses in a countrylike setting, which is, after all, the mainstay of Broadacre City, took hold in the American popular imagination.

Frank Lloyd Wright at eighty-four.

Wright’s much derided vision of a decentralized American urbanism turned into reality as more and more middle-class—and increasingly, working-class—families moved to the suburbs. Moreover, all the new postwar Sunbelt cities, such as Atlanta, Houston, and Phoenix, followed a Broadacre pattern—spreading out rather than going up. Many factors accelerated this dispersal. In marked contrast to urban renewal, ranch houses and residential subdivisions proved both popular and successful. The 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, which funded the interstate highway system, opened up outlying rural areas to urbanization. That same year saw the construction of the first fully enclosed shopping mall, not so different from the glass-roofed “roadside markets” of Broadacre City, supporting Wright’s contention that “ideas always precede and prefigure facts.”18

The ascendancy of automobile travel took place just as Wright foretold. In fact, the technological forces fueling decentralization proved even more numerous than he imagined. Growth outside the cities has been accelerated by cheap and ubiquitous air travel (which he foresaw), and cable television, home videos, cell phones, and the Internet (which he didn’t). Not only enclosed shopping malls but a variety of other suburban building types such as megachurches, office parks, gas-stations-cum-convenience-stores, and suburban high-rises eerily fulfilled his original vision. Wright, despite his eccentricities, had an uncanny sense of the likes and dislikes of his fellow citizens. Americans do prefer freestanding houses to apartments, and “one acre per family,” which seemed a farfetched formula in the 1930s, has turned out to be not far off the mark, although the acre tends to be planted in lawn rather than corn. Of course, banal shopping strips and gated communities are not what Wright had in mind, but they are, in many ways, a logical extension of his decentralizing vision.

Wright was mistaken about one thing, however: the city hasn’t disappeared. Even as metropolitan areas have spread out in crude versions of Broadacre City, the centers of most cities have also grown, and while older industrial centers such as Detroit, Baltimore, and Cleveland have faltered, New York, Boston, and San Francisco have found new life. But perhaps Wright never completely believed his own dire prognostication. At the same time as he was writing The Living City, he proposed a 528-story state office building for Chicago’s lakefront called the Mile High Illinois. “No one can afford to build it now,” he announced when he unveiled his design, “but in the future no one can afford not to build it.”19 He was right about that, too. Downtown Chicago would grow vertically by leaps and bounds, first the John Hancock Building, then the Sears Tower, and in 2005 a Chicago developer proposed a 115-story skyscraper. That project has been abandoned, but a half-mile-high skyscraper—currently the tallest structure in the world—has gone up in Dubai. The stalagmite shape of the Burj Khalifa, designed by the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, recalls the Mile High design. And it is, of course, in a city.

*The New York Times article was misleadingly illustrated by a drawing of a high-rise apartment building, Wright’s Saint Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie proposal for New York City.

^*Le Corbusier’s Contemporary City included unbuilt open areas of green-belt. The gross density of Broadacre City was 1,750 people per square mile (compared to the average gross suburban density today, which is 2,149 people per square mile).