Big Frank, Unwitting Champion of Suburban Hell

The Rectangular Survey 1785. A monumental retasking of territory in service of captial, despite the locals.

Conceived in model in 1937, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City was the embodiment of his urban philosophy and is an important precedent in the history of suburbia. However Wright’s plan is somewhat anomalous within this historical course. Despite his apoplectic ravings about the hellish conditions of the American metropolis, Broadacre anachronistically continues the lineage of American urban gridirons from the 19^th Century. It also manages to predicting that banal white collar vision of hell: suburbia. This ambiguity means the Broadacre Grid is more a vehicle to transmit Wright’s polemical views on urbanism than a concrete solution. It reads better as a visual manifesto that espouses low rise individualist buildings, connected to commercial social and industrial centres by a (then futuristic) arterial road network.

Part of a larger drawing set exploring Broadacre. Shows roadways and non domesetic footprints.

The plan represented a typical Midwestern landscape superimposed with a grid of eighty by fifty metre modules. These acre plots are mainly populated by single family dwellings, intended as Usonian Houses, with the remainder forming a smallholding. This agrarian pattern checkerboards the majority of the plan. Precedents for this organisation of territory stretch back to the late 18^th Century, however what is radical about Wright’s proposal is the procurement and allocation of land. Broadacre was tied to Federal lands owned by the government. According to the plan, these regions would be subdivided into the acre plots and redistributed to the populace on a scale only matched by the contemporary Soviet Union.

 The housing is suspended between two highways that run North South. The primary interstate is buffered by industrial programme and is punctuated with amenities for road travellers, like hotels and petrol stations. The second narrower highway to the East defines the location for social and cultural features. They are connected by secondary East West roadways at 1 mile intervals to feed the residential interior. To provide the vehicle access necessitated by the plan, the grid disintegrates without the highway network into branching stems of farm roads and clusters of housing.

 At no point does Wright form conventional streets, nor urban blocks within the plan. Borrowing a cup of sugar from the neighbours would more likely play out like a stage in the Oregon Trail. If in indeed you could call those distant specks neighbours. Wright's utopia is completely antithetical to the collectivist fantasies of the Europeans. Broadacre city is a field of infrastructure, into which objects can be dropped relatively autonomously, forming islands of programme within the sea of houses, fields and roads. The concentration of amenities in the plan is deceptive. When stretched over its intended area Broadacre City becomes far sparser and more homogeneous.  People would be almost entirely reliant on their car for transportation. Proposed as a utopian alternative, Broadacre city actually came to epitomise normative suburban character. 

North Cucamonga, San Bernadino County, CA. So much for the small holdings, but the principle here is the same.
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