Shape the space between buildings as carefully as the rooms: make outdoor spaces partly enclosed and convex, like outdoor rooms, rather than leftover gaps around freestanding objects.
An acre for every family
Give every family at least an acre of its own ground (enough for a house, a garden and an orchard) and let the house open to that ground rather than to a street.
1 acre ≈ 4,050 m² ≈ 64 × 64 m
Wright’s democracy was a land of freeholders. His model laid out a four-square-mile section on the American survey grid, subdivided into homesteads of an acre and more, little farms of several acres, orchards and vineyards. The acre is a minimum; Wright’s own phrasing varies between an acre per family and an acre per person.
Related rules
On an equator-facing window, make the overhang deep enough to shade the whole window from the high noon sun of summer, and no deeper, so that the low winter sun passes beneath it into the room.
noon sun altitude = 90° − latitude ± 23.44° · overhang D = window height ⁄ tan(summer altitude)
Shape a building to its place so that it seems to grow out of the ground: take its lines from the landscape, its materials from the region, and its plan from the life it will hold.
On flat land, keep the house low and let its lines run parallel to the ground: low-pitched hipped roofs with deep overhangs, continuous sills and copings, bands of windows, and terraces extending into the garden.
roof pitch ≈ 15°–25° · eaves projecting 1.5–3 m
Dissolve the centralised city: with the car, the telephone and the radio every service can be spread along the highways, the market beside the road, the factory near the homes, the few tall buildings standing alone in parkland.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “An acre for every family”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/broadacre-acre. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.