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.
The city along the highway
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.
In Broadacre City the arterial road is the main street. Along it stand roadside markets, filling stations, motels and small factories; a monorail runs beside it. The county seat, schools, a stadium and a few apartment towers of Wright’s St Mark’s type are scattered through the landscape, each at a short drive from every home.
Related rules
The outward form of a building should arise from, and express, what the building does and how it is made, as the form of every living thing expresses its life.
Plan the house around a great fireplace at its heart, and let the wings of the plan extend from it in a cross or a pinwheel.
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
Build the family house on one level on a heated concrete slab, on a planning grid, round a brick core of hearth and kitchen; wall it in wood towards the street and in glass towards the garden; roof it flat with deep eaves, and shelter the car in a carport instead of a garage.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The city along the highway”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/broadacre-decentralised. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.