Frank Lloyd Wright, Broadacre City (1932; model 1935; 1945; 1958)

Wright’s decentralised city: every family on at least an acre of its own land, the automobile, the radio and the telephone dissolving the old centres, and the whole country spread along its highways.

Wright set out the idea in The Disappearing City (1932), built a large model of a four-square-mile section with his Taliesin apprentices, and exhibited it at the Rockefeller Center in 1935. He revised the book as When Democracy Builds (1945) and The Living City (1958). The model showed homesteads of an acre or more, small farms and orchards, factories and roadside markets along a multi-lane arterial road, a few isolated tall buildings standing in parkland, schools, a stadium and a county seat, all at the scale of the car.

Broadacre City was never built, but it anticipated, and in Wright’s own view ennobled, the suburban spread of post-war America. Its houses were to be his Usonian houses: one-storey, heated through the floor slab, opening to the garden, with a carport in place of a garage.

The book, part by part

I The plan

The acre per family, the highway, the market, the Usonian house.

Rules: An acre for every family · The city along the highway · The Usonian house

Rules drawn from Broadacre City

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

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.