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Broadacre city was an urban or suburban development concept proposed by Frank Lloyd Wright late in his life. He presented the idea in his book The disappearing city in 1932. A few years later he unveiled a very detailed twelve by twelve foot scale model representing an hypothetical four square mile community. The model was crafted by the student interns who worked for him at Taliesin. Wright would go on refining the concept in later books and in articles until his death in 1959.Many of the building models in the model were completely new designs by Wright while others were refinements of old ones, some of which had been rarely seen.
Broadacre city was the antithesis of a city and the apotheosis of the newly born suburbia, shaped through Wright's particular vision. It was both a planning statement and a socio-political scheme by which each U.S. family would be given a one acre plot of land from the federal lands reserves, and a Wright-conceived community would be built anew from this. In a sense it was the exact opposite of the recent idea of Transit-oriented development. There is a train station and a few office and apartment buildings in Broadacre city, but the apartment dwellers are expected to be a small minority. All important transport is done by automobile and the pedestrian can exist safely only within the confines of the one acre plots where most of the population dwells. The car is not supreme though, since the true overlord is Architecture and its immediate interpret is the architect.
Wright was probably pushed into action by the work and ideas of his former colleague, Richard Neutra around the concept of what he called Rush city . Wright's view was different in many respects (Neutra factored in pedestrians and their special needs for one), so he was not so much inspired by Neutra as driven, by his keen sense of competition, to show the world what his vision of communities of the future was like.
Some of the earlier garden city ideas of the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and the urban planner Ebenezer Howard had much in common with Broadacre city, save for the absence of the automobile, born much later.
More recently, the development of the Edge city is like an unplanned, incomplete version of Broadacre city.
1 See also
List of planned cities
2 References
- Krohe, James Jr. Return to Broadacre City. Illinois Issues April 2000, 27. Also in digital form on the Web.
- Wright, Frank Lloyd. The Disappearing City. New York, W. F. Payson, 1932
- Wright, Frank Lloyd. The Living City. New York, Horizon Press, 1958.
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