Category: Wright in Wisconsin

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Broadacre City

Revisiting Wright’s Vision of a ‘New Freedom’ for American Living in an Age of Global Pandemic

By Brian R. Hannan

When Frank Lloyd Wright introduced Broadacre City to readers of “The New York Times Magazine” in March 1932, the United States was in the grips of the Great Depression and on the cusp of the Dust Bowl. As the concept evolved and the apprentices built a promotional model, he promised it would bring a “new freedom for living in America.”

“The Broadacre City is not merely the only democratic city,” Wright wrote. “It is the only possible city, looking toward the future.”

Nearly nine decades later, Broadacre City remains both a curiosity in the architect’s portfolio and a challenge. As we work to stop the spread of COVID-19 and shore up the economy, was Wright right? Could his utopian vision help to advance our own search for national and personal renewal in the postmodern era?

Jennifer Gray

“It’s almost uncanny how perfect it would be in the current moment,” said Jennifer Gray, curator of drawings and archives at Columbia University’s Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library. “The pandemic has given people a chance to re-evaluate” how, even in the best of times, they’re forced to juggle competing professional obligations and personal commitments.

“People are waking up to that, and they realize they want to reset the balance.”

For Wright, Gray said, Broadacre City emerged as his response to overlapping concerns about the machine, densely populated cities — which he described as a “fibrous tumor” — and rising economic, political and social inequalities. She contends he conceived Broadacre City as a thought experiment rather than as a literal blueprint: How can the United States ease the urban-rural divide, reconnect citizens with nature and foster a renewed sense of autonomy and self-reliance?

In other words, “more agency,” Gray said. “They’re not dependent on the government or their boss or whatever else. I think that’s the whole idea.”

Home and land ownership emerged as the common denominator for Wright, who would assign each “Usonia” household a thoughtfully designed house atop a minimum of one acre — more for farms or families with children. Removing the distinction between landlords and tenants, while providing people with the means of growing their own food and selling the excess for profit, would eliminate much of the inequality he saw and bolster democracy.

Humane use of the machine would ensure societal needs were met while reducing the hours people worked. With more time, they could enjoy leisure, exercise, the arts and community and social activities. At four square miles, each self-contained-and-interconnected Broadacre City minimized commutes, reducing stress and congestion. Many workers could use the telephone to perform their duties at home, and radio would keep citizens informed.

“All common interests take place in a simple coordination wherein all are employed: little farms, little homes for industry, little factories, little schools, a little university…, little laboratories…,” Wright wrote. “Economic independence would be near, a subsistence certain; life varied and interesting.”

In the context of the COVID-19 outbreak, quarantining in place would be easier, and people need not fear eviction. Less density, when paired with social distancing, could translate into lower spread.

The downside? “You wouldn’t actually be able to do it,” Gray said, citing massive redistribution of wealth, prohibitive cost and wholesale restructuring. “It’s more about thinking through different ways of living and different ways of being in a community.

“So even if the solution is not Broadacre City, we can at least make improvements on things like education, local government, environmental sustainability, class disparity and gender and racial inequality,” she added. “I think it’s a way to think through these problems, and maybe we arrive at solutions that are more practical.”

The changes Wright envisioned with Broadacre City, occasionally reflecting his inclinations and idiosyncrasies — a car in every carport and not a power line in sight — were sweeping. Even he conceded in a 1935 article for “Architectural Record” that “(t)here are too many details involved in the model of Broadacres to permit complete explanation. Study of the model is necessary study.”

Indeed, Wright would spend the rest of his life tinkering with Broadacre City and tweaking its central concepts. He filled three books and several articles with his musings and continually wove new architectural projects into the plywood tapestry: Beth Sholom Synagogue, The Illinois, the Marin County Civic Center, Price Tower and various Usonian homes, among others.

The Broadacre City model last visited the Badger State in 2011 as part of an exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum: “Frank Lloyd Wright: Organic Architecture for the 21st Century.” At the time, the late Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, then archives director at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, told a reporter: “It seems like a good time to remind people that there was a good way in which architecture helped people live better and live in harmony not only with themselves but the planet they are living on.”

Gray agrees, phrasing in the present tense the renewed optimism she sees amid architects and the progress they can facilitate through coordinated, grassroots action — if not the top-down mandate of a Broadacre City. “We can change the society we live in,” she said. “We don’t have to take the status quo.”

For Further Reading

• “Broadacre City: An Architect’s Vision,” “The New York Times Sunday Magazine,” March 20, 1932
• “The Disappearing City,” Frank Lloyd Wright, William Farquhar Payson, 1935
• “Broadacre City: A New Community Plan,” “Architectural Record,” 1935
• “When Democracy Builds,” Frank Lloyd Wright, University of Chicago Press, 1945
• “The Living City,” Frank Lloyd Wright, Horizon Press, 1958

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Connecting the Dots



New Biography Explores Wright’s Childhood Interests, Adult Achievements

By Brian R. Hannan

Long before he put pencil to paper and penned a new chapter in the story of American architecture, Barb Rosenstock reminds us, Frank Lloyd Wright was a boy. A “prairie boy,” that is, who fell in love with shapes.

“Frank Lloyd Wright took his first breath on the Wisconsin prairie,” she writes. “He crawled in the paths of brush-footed butterflies and toddled through waves of tall grass … growing into the kind of boy who wondered … what makes the prairie feel like home?”

Helping to shape those musings, we learn in “Prairie Boy: Frank Lloyd Wright Turns the Heartland into a Home,” (Calkins Creek) is his mother, Anna. She gives him his first set of Froebel gifts – with a cube, a cylinder, a set of dowel rods, a sphere and three lengths of string – and sets him on an artistic path.

As Wright’s interest grows: “More blocks from Mother. Rectangles. Triangles. Half-moons” Rosenstock writes. “Frank set these new shapes on paper grids, studied sample pictures of pinwheels, crosses and stars. He shifted one shape to the next, turning piece by piece, his mind like a kaleidoscope.”

Years pass, Wright’s desire to be an architect deepening as he grows into an adult. Taking his first job as a draftsman in Chicago, Wright soon joins the well-known architecture firm Adler & Sullivan before opening his own shop.

“He sketched long, rectangular houses that snuggled into the flat plans,” Rosenstock writes. “He colored them in reds, browns and golds.”

In writing about Wright, Rosenstock said she hopes to encourage children to find and pursue their passion in life – not to copy someone else. It’s a theme she’s explored in the biographies for children she’s written about children who grew into well-known grownups: founding father Ben Franklin, photographer Dorothea Lange and painter Vincent van Gogh, among others.

“I stick really close to the child this person started as, and the actions of that child – and the interest of that child,” Rosenstock said. “The book is not set up as ‘be just like Frank.’ It is more set up like ‘your interests as a child have meaning, and they’re important.’ Wonderful things can come out of following what your brain and your hands tell you you’re interested in.”

“Prairie Boy” published in September 2019 – just weeks before a darker, adult examination of Wright’s life arrived in bookstores. In “Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright,” (Alfred A. Knopf) author Paul Hendrickson chronicles the conflagrations that defined Wright’s career and personal life. He explores the self-invention and reinvention Wright must have hoped would douse them.

By coincidence, both Rosenstock and Hendrickson trace their interest in Wright to childhood memories of the home he designed in Kankakee, Ill., for B. Harley Bradley. Rosenstock fondly recalls her father – a builder – taking her to see the Prairie School house.

Where the two books diverge, of course, is the level of detail they reveal about Wright’s personal life. Where Hendrickson’s Wright is fully realized, Rosenstock’s Wright is age-appropriate for the 7-to-10-year-old audience she has in mind.

Indeed, the Wright readers meet in “Prairie Boy” is a curious and precocious child. From the Wisconsin heartland he called home, he “built big dreams” and “turned architecture inside out.”

“Like magic, he shook dozens of shapes from his shirtsleeves – ovals, hexagons, triangles, cubes, spheres and cylinders,” Rosenstock writes in the book’s final pages. “Frank’s buildings grew like children, like grasses, like the earth itself.”

Editor’s Note: Visit barbrosenstock.com to learn more about the author and to download educational resources for “Prairie Boy.”

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Organic Architecture and Sustainability

Stuart Graff Explores Ecosystems and the ‘Intrinsic Nature’ of the Places Where We Live, Play, Work

By Brian R. Hannan*

Stuart Graff

For Stuart Graff, “sustainability” is the newest front in understanding Frank Lloyd Wright’s concept of organic architecture and its implications for a 21st-century world.

“We live in a time where, on one hand, we pay a lot of lip service to notions of sustainability,” the president and CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation said. “But what do we revere? We revere buildings that have no connections to the world around them – at least many people do. Why are we revering those buildings as opposed to the buildings that call attention to themselves because they just become a part of the fabric of a city, a community, a landscape?

“Those are the buildings we should be revering because they are doing the work of nature,” Graff said. “They are allowing human endeavor to be a part of nature as opposed to being the exception from it.”

In April, Arizona-based Graff presented a pair of lectures on sustainability – one in the Golden Rondelle at the S.C. Johnson & Son Inc. corporate headquarters in Racine and another in the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center in Madison. Bringing a mindfulness to how we manage change in a modern society and efficiently use finite natural resources “fits into American values,” he said.

“You can go back to the ‘Declaration of Independence’ and go back even further to John Locke’s enlightenment philosophy in which he explores the idea of laws from nature, which includes concepts like equality and liberty. Then look at the way Ralph Waldo Emerson treated them, speaking of the natural law as this spiritual thing that seems to come out of the land itself,” Graff said. “It is this thing that just blossoms and flows, and Wright picks up on that throughout his entire life and body of work.”

Like Wright before him, Graff acknowledges the challenge of capturing such lofty ideals in common sense language. But through his extensive reading and musing about Wright and transcendental principles, he said, “I keep coming back to this notion of an ‘ecosystem.’”

In this construct, Graff defines architecture as “sustainable” when its purpose and setting – its “intrinsic nature” – are connected to the land on which it is built.

“Trees grow because the nutrients in the soil make sense, when the amount of available water, the amount of light and the surrounding plants, animals and activity all allow it to thrive there,” he said.
“Why shouldn’t a building be doing the exact same thing and, for that matter, why shouldn’t a city be doing the exact same thing? And a person, their life and their activity be doing the exact same thing?”

Editor’s Note: In July 2018, Graff wrote about sustainability and Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic architecture in an article for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s blog, “The Whirling Arrow.” The essay is titled “Organic Architecture and the Sustaining Ecosystem.”

* Note: Article based on an interview transcript made by Michael Ditmer, president of Wright in Wisconsin.