A section of Wright’s decentralised city: Usonian houses each on its own acre, little farms and orchards, a roadside market and small factories on the arterial highway with its monorail, and a single tower standing alone as the county seat.
Wright’s answer to the crowded city was to dissolve it into the countryside. In The Disappearing City (1932) and the great model his apprentices built in 1934–35, the survey grid of the American Midwest is filled with homesteads of at least an acre for every family, little farms, orchards and vineyards. The car, the telephone and the radio make every service reachable: markets, factories, motels and filling stations line the arterial highway, and a monorail runs beside it.
The houses are Wright’s Usonian houses (one storey on a heated slab, an L of wood and glass round a garden opening to the south, a brick hearth at the crux and a carport instead of a garage), with a few solar hemicycles among them. Larger Prairie houses stand on the farms, a house over a stream recalls Fallingwater, and the county seat is a single tall building, floors cantilevered from a central trunk like the branches of a tree, alone in its park.
Only part of a four-square-mile section is shown; its arrangement is a free reconstruction of the model’s principles rather than a copy of its layout.