ABSTRACT
Were Wright’s larger, more functionally complex community designs theoretically and practically structured in a manner similar to buildings? Before 1914, his housing commissions included individual or detached, duplex or semi-detached, and multiple living units, such as row houses, apartments, and hotels. Of this group, the largest was the ill-fated Lexington Terraces project begun 1901. However, commissions for large, more functionally complex buildings, those for tourism, entertainment, recreation, and skyscraping, were difficult to acquire after about 1904.1
To understand Wright’s thoughts about – and designs for – social communities is to place him in a historical context where, as with the earlier discussion about Progressivism’s aesthetic component, he was a rather quiet, ill-fitting exemplar in this investigation to outline a possible Progressives’ City. Before 1900, the Western city’s form and physical character were, like architecture, rooted in historical precedents or in surveyor’s tools. Western civilization’s first described systemic city planning scheme was developed in Pharaonic Egypt and was orthogonal; so, too, were colonial towns of antique Greece and Rome. Based on cosmological or religio-philosophical ideas, a mix of rigidly but easily applied ideal geometries began in the 1400s to persist into the nineteenth century. A more pertinent inauguration, however, occurred at the end of the eighteenth century with a partially competed town designed by the well-known French architect Claude-Nicholas Ledoux.
