I’ve always thought that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City has been over-criticized. Yeah, with decades of hindsight, it seems like a really bad idea and, God knows, I would not enjoy living there (I hate dealing with cars). But Broadacre would be an idyllic paradise compared to many, many other — worse — would-be utopias.
The Web Urbanist is one of the those daily catalogs of potentially interesting things, mostly intended to distract you from getting your work done — you know, the site you go to read about “Ten Western Ghost Towns” or “Ten Scary Looking Parasites that Live in Your Kitchen”. Yesterday they posted “Retro-Futurism: 13 Failed Urban Design Ideas”. Of course Broadacre City made the list, but it is by far the least awful of the places (with the possible exception of Boozetown). Admittedly, it’s not a real accomplishment to be less unpleasant than Hitler’s Welthauptstadt, but even Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine looks hellish next to Wright’s vision of suburbia.
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