MYRENE V.

MADDARA ARCH 3A

 BROADACRE CITY – FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

Wright's ideal community was a complete rejection of the American cities of the first half of the
20th century. According to him, cities would no longer be centralized; no longer beholden to the
pedestrian or the central business district. Broadacre City was a thought experiment as much as
it was a serious proposal—one where the automobile would reign supreme. It was a truly
prophetic vision of modern America.

Cutting Away the "Fibrous Tumor"

Wright saw many of humanity's problems reflected in the outmoded cities around him. "To look
at the plan of a great City is to look at something like the cross-section of a fibrous tumor," he
wrote in 1945. The city was a scourge; an antiquated idea that may have been useful in the past,
but was rendered completely obsolete by new technology.
But what he proposed instead—Broadacre City—was largely a romanticized fantasy, dreamt up
by a self-serving narcissist. Laid out over a number of different articles and talks as well as three
books, The Disappearing City (1932), When Democracy Builds (1945), and The Living City (1958),
Wright's utopia was ultimately an extension of the things that made him personally
comfortable: open spaces, the automobile, and not surprisingly, the architect as master
controller.
Reading the books in chronological order, one sees the progression of American futurism over
three decades—from the Great Depression of the 1930s with the spread of household electricity
and new communications technologies, to the postwar techno-utopian ideals of the 1950s,
complete with streamlined cars and flying machines.
In 1935, Wright wrote an article for the Architectural Record describing the emerging
technologies behind his vision for this new utopia. It would be a feat of modern technology,
built upon some of America's greatest strengths:
1. The motor car: general mobilization of the human being.
2. Radio, telephone and telegraph: electrical inter-communication becoming complete.
3. Standardized machine-shop production: machine invention plus scientific discovery.
Who needed to rush into the city for work, commerce or entertainment, when the wonders of
radio and telephone made things like telecommuting and remote concerts available? At least for
the white collar middle class. People could retreat to something that was not quite urban, and
not quite rural—a sprawling collection of houses, business and government centers roughly on
the scale of a modern American county.
And so Wright and his team of apprentices (who were each paying for the pleasure to work for
him) set out to make a model of this Broadacre utopia from their own mini-utopian outpost in
Arizona.
Wright and his crew took the model to New York City—that loathsome metropolis that
represented everything Wright thought was wrong with America. The model was displayed at
Rockefeller Center and was seen by roughly 40,000 visitors, according to an estimate by the New
York Times. From there it would then go on tour in different American cities, spreading the
Broadacre gospel.
The Balm For What Ails America
According to Wright, technology and planning were tools in the great struggle for social reform.
As Dr. Mark Lapping at the University of Southern Maine explained to me over the phone, Frank
Lloyd Wright believed that by designing a better city, America's social failures would simply
dissolve.
"He imagined himself as someone who could solve a huge number of social issues and social
problems through design," Lapping says. "But not all social problems can be solved by design—
even very good design."
The key to Wright's utopia, of course, were the tremendous technological advances made at the
dawn of the 20th century—perhaps none more important than the car. "I think he, like a lot of
people during that era, were really struggling to understand the revolutionary nature of the
automobile and how it was going to change American life forever," Lapping told me. "Broadacre
City is really a vision of life as gas station."
That description is no exaggeration. In his 1932 book The Disappearing City, Wright explained
that the answer to the problem of how the people of this utopian community might buy goods.
The gas station would become the most important marketplace of Broadacres:
In the gasoline service station may be seen the beginning of an important advance agent of
decentralization by way of distribution and also the beginning of the establishment of the
Broadacre City.
Wherever the service station happens to be naturally located, these now crude and seemingly
insignificant units will grow and expand into various distributing centers for merchandise of all
sorts. They are already doing so in the Southwest to a great extent.
By the 1950s, Wright's drawings for Broadacre looked as though they had been torn from an alt-
universe pulp sci-fi comic. The vehicles were sleek and modern—but they were shown floating
across pastoral, exurban scenes of wide open spaces and verdant fields.
Wright was imagining "urban renewal," long before the term became a craze amongst the
planners of the 1950s and 60s. But unlike those designers, Wright's vision of urban renewal was
to destroy the "urban" part of the city entirely. Starting from scratch, as so many utopians do,
provided the most straightforward of blank canvasses.
"It's a very appealing notion to have a raw piece of land," Lapping tells me. "And on that land
you can arrange spaces and transportation systems and nodes and networks that you think will
add to human happiness. That was also endemic in most of Soviet architecture and planning.
There is this sense that 'I know what's best for people.' And it's a very distinctive type of high-
modernism."
Democracy Governed By Architects
Wright's vision was as much political as it was aesthetic—and it reflected the progressive ideals
of a 1930s America, crippled by the Great Depression. For some, a radical restructuring of
society seemed like the only way out of the massive economic hole engulfing the country.
Wright saw land ownership as a democratizing force, and part of his plan for Broadacres was to
give every family an acre of land to call their own.
In his 1977 paper Frank Lloyd Wright and the American City: The Broadacres Debate, Stephen
Grabow puts Broadacre City into the political context of the time:
In the political sphere, the Wisconsin Progressive party platform of 1934 favored home and land
ownership for every American; public ownership of all utilities, including transportation and
communications; free education and health care; agricultural and food cooperatives; and the
nationalization of banking and lending institutions. Almost all these proposals appeared in
Broadacre City.
But as Lapping points out, Broadacre City wasn't exactly a democratic vision. While it may have
imagined abolishing landlords and providing plenty of opportunities for direct democracy, it was
the local architects—the "essential interpreters of America's humanity" as Wright called them—
who ultimately had the last word on what was permitted in each development. These unelected
 designers would have a kind of control that seemed to be completely at odds with Wright's
populist rhetoric.
Wright's obsession with control was overbearing but not uncommon for men of his ilk. The
movie director, the architect; these allegorical characters so often seem to only feel at home
when they can control everything in their midsts. Wright wasn't content in simply
micromanaging the design of his buildings. He was known to meticulously arrange furniture in
some of the private residences he built and demand that nothing be moved once he was gone.
There are even stories that Wright would dictate which dress a woman was supposed to wear in
her home.
An Unbuilt Vision—That's All Around Us
Sadly, at least for Wright, his version of the architect as ruler would not come to pass. But just
about everything else in his plan became an accepted part of the American landscape.
"[Broadacre City] is the reality that is today," Lapping says. "I think to some extent the interstate
highways, the rise of massive shopping malls, the cookie-cutter developments in suburbia —
they are Broadacre, and Broadacre is them in a lot of ways. Not necessary planned, more in a
piecemeal fashion."
"If you look at Broadacre City piece by piece and drawing by drawing, sure enough almost
everything he designed you can find in there," Lapping says. Broadacre was a testing ground for
perfection, or at the very least something more civilized than the chaos that seemed to define
20th century life.
Wright foresaw that his model for the perfect community would probably never actually be built
to his specifications. He believed that perhaps America was too broken to recover from the
degradation of the city; too blind to the possibilities of what he saw as a better way of life.
We got the cars; the sprawl; the gas stations. Cities as diverse as Los Angeles and Houston and
Janesville, Wisconsin are in some ways versions of Wright's Broadacre dream. But in the end, for
better and for worse, America never saw the rise of that architect king.

 CITY BEAUTIFUL MOVEMENT – DANIEL BURNHAM

The City Beautiful Movement emerged in response to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in
Chicago. The fundamental idea expounded at the fair was that the city was no longer a symbol
of economic development and industrialization, but could now be seen as enhancing the
aesthetic environment of its many inhabitants. The fair, coordinated by architect Daniel
Burnham, deeply impacted the way that Americans saw the urban landscape, and brought the
United States to the level of its European predecessors in terms of architectural design.1 New
York architects such as Richard Morris Hunt and McKim, Mead and White, together with the
Chicago school of architects such as Louis Sullivan and Daniel Burnham created an ideal city
made up of classically designed monumental buildings. The “magical white city” that Chicago
embodied demonstrated for the first time that cities could be planned.2 Artists and architects
were deeply impacted by the beautiful designs at the fair that upon returning to major cities like
New York, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., they took notice of the austere and cluttered
landscape in their own cities. During the height of the Industrial Revolution, technological
advancement paid little attention to the visual elements of urban cities. Smoke billowed from
factories, soot covered buildings, and streets were merely symbols of progress.

Once visitors returned to their cities and they realized that it was essential to the public welfare
of the people to take heed of the urban landscape, many American cities embarked on public
building and art projects in order to beautify their cities.
In Washington, D.C., this led to the creation of the McMillan Plan (named after Senator
McMillan), the first governmental plan to regulate aesthetics. The plan included the major
players behind the planning of the Chicago World’s Fair: Daniel Burnham, Frederick Law
Olmsted, Jr., Charles F. McKim, and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.3

They revived Pierre L’Enfant’s original city design plans for Washington, D.C. The results can still
be seen today. The McMillan Plan led to the construction of the tree-lined National Mall, the
Jefferson Memorial, and the Lincoln Memorial.4

Many American cities lacked governmental regulation of their urban infrastructure. For
instance, New York City at the turn of the century was described as a “ragged pin cushion of
towers.”5 Massive immigration to the City, combined with the overcrowded tenement housing
created the vision of a discordant urban environment marked by poverty and social injustice.
Jacob Riis’s telling portrayal of tenement living in How the Other Half Lives, published in 1891,
describes the urban plight of emigrant slums, which characterized American cities during this
time period.6 The City Beautiful Movement promoted the idea that beautifying the city is
beneficial. It spurred the creation of the Municipal Art Society in New York City, which works to
promote public art in the City and also led to the development of legislative means for the City
to control its physical environment.7

RELEVANCE TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORIC PRESERVATION

The City Beautiful Movement led to the creation of numerous art societies seeking to obtain
legislative means for aesthetic regulation in New York City. This idea eventually led to the
preservation of historic structures for the public good with the passage of the Bard Act and the
New York City Landmarks Law.

The Municipal Art Society was one organization that was formed as part of the City Beautiful
Movement. Upon returning home from Chicago after the World's Fair, prominent New York
artists and visitors realized the potential for New York to gleam as a beacon for the arts and
urban design. On a more fundamental level, artists took with them the idea that art was not just
for the elite but was to be shared with the public.8 These artists, including William Vanderbilt
Allen and Evageline Blashfield decided to form the Municipal Art Society. Their mission was to
promote the idea that public art was for the benefit of the public and promoted an enhanced
state of being.9

In addition, Albert S. Bard played a pivotal role in the City Beautiful Movement in New York City.
He was a lawyer with an affinity for the arts. Like his contemporaries, the World's Fair had also
provided him with the idea that a city could be regulated for aesthetic purposes. He joined the
Municipal Art Society in 1901, joined its board in 1911, became its Secretary in 1912, and its
President in 1917.10 Bard's influence on the City Beautiful Movement would lead to drafting the
Bard Act, which enabled municipalities to pass laws for aesthetic regulation of private
property.11

The City Beautiful Movement inspired residents of New York City to fight for the regulation of
billboard advertisements. New York City at the turn of the century had no laws protecting the
physical fabric of the City. By the 1870s, large billboard advertising signs dotted the urban
landscape.12 There were some nascent efforts to control billboard signage. In 1896, for
instance, the Parks Commissioner passed a law removing billboards from public parks.13
However, by 1911, New York City was reported to have 3.8 million square feet of billboard
advertisements.14 Art societies, including the Municipal Art Society and the American Scenic
and Historic Preservation Society, began to use billboard regulation as a way to beautify the
City. The Municipal Art Society, along with Albert Bard, worked on legislative measures to
regulate the billboard placement in the City.15 In 1913, the Mayor set up a commission to find
methods for billboard regulation called the Mayor's Billboard Advertising Commission of the City
of New York. Robert G. Cooke, head of the commission, claimed that the advertisements "rob
the people of their rightful heritage of natural beauty."16 Eventually the 1916 zoning resolution,
which divided the City into specific areas or zones, worked to set up rules for billboard signage
on public property.17 The problem, however, appeared to be regulation of private property for
aesthetic reasons for the benefit of the public. The initial efforts waged by Bard and the
Municipal Art Society served as a "progenitor" of the Bard Act eventually leading to the passage
of the Landmarks Law.18

The Bard Act in many ways owes its existence to the City Beautiful Movement.19 The
fundamental idea of this movement was that the livability of cities was essential to the health,
welfare, and safety of the people. By beautifying the city, the government was providing a
benefit to the public overriding private interests. The Bard Act passed in 1956, and permitted
local municipalities enabling legislation to pass laws that regulate the aesthetics of the city. The
"police powers" were extended to mean that the regulation of the physical environment
promoted the health, safety, and welfare of the people.

In turn, the passing of the Bard Act paved the way for the New York City Landmarks Law because
it gave the power of the City to pass legislation for aesthetic regulation. Historic buildings were
now seen as enhancing city blocks and promoting a charming feel to neighborhoods. Preserving
historic structures would soon be included in these aesthetic regulations when the New York
City Landmarks Law was passed. This idea was predicated on the "police powers" in which
preserving structures of cultural and historic significance was providing a service to the public by
enhancing the aesthetic environment of the City.20

SOURCES:
https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/broadacre-city-frank-lloyd-wrights-unbuilt-suburban-ut-
1509433082
http://www.nypap.org/preservation-history/city-beautiful-movement/