ABSTRACT
In this selection, from Architectural Record (1935), architect Frank Lloyd Wright lays out his radical idea for the city of the future. In what he called “Broadacre City,” every citizen of the United States would be given a minimum of one acre of land, with the family homestead being the basis of a new urban civilization. Many at the time thought the idea was totally outlandish, but Broadacre (and the small, efficient “Usonian” house) proved to be prophetic as sprawling suburban regions transformed the American landscape during the last half of the twentieth century. Wright despised the popular philistinism of his day and attributed what he thought was the decline of American culture to “the mobocracy” and to the unprincipled bankers and politicians who served its interests. Wright was a social revolutionary who called for a radical transformation of American society to restore earlier Emersonian and Jeffersonian virtues of individualism and self-reliance. Wright believed that two inventions – the telephone and the automobile – made the old cities “no longer modern,” and he fervently looked forward to the day when dense agglomerations like New York and Chicago would wither and decay. In their place, Americans would re-inhabit the rural landscape (and re-acquire the rural virtues of family independence and individual freedom) with a “city” of homesteads in which people would be isolated enough from one another to insure family stability but connected enough, through modern telecommunications and transportation, to achieve a real sense of community.
