The exhibit “Frank Lloyd Wright:Organic Architecture for the 21st Century” has less than a month left until it leaves Milwaukee. Mark Hertzberg’s Wright in Racine blog has an article on the architectural models used in the exhibit, with photos.
It’s worth following the link to see the model of Broadacre City alone.
Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities is the newest book by Witold Rybczynski, architect, professor and critic (as architecture critic for Slate, he wrote the essay on Beth Shalom Synagogue). A tour through the history of urban design, and where the design of cities is headed.
American cities are not shaped by architects, planners, legislators, or mayors, but by the market, that is, by the people who live and work―and play―in them. But ideas have a role to play, and Makeshift Metropolis explores the influence that planning theories have had on American urbanism in the twentieth century. In the 1960s, for example, pedestrian malls in cities seemed like a good idea, and hundreds of cities closed streets and installed planters and benches. Today, most of these malls have been turned back into streets―except in a few college towns. Sometimes what appear to be a bad idea, or at least an obsolete idea, returns. Nobody advocated large city parks in the 1970s―they seemed like a throwback to the nineteenth century, yet today new city parks, preferably next to water, are being built across the country. Witold Rybczynski examines old ideas and new ideas, and shows how the twenty-first century city is being shaped by mixed-use developments, downtown living, heterogeneity, density, and liveliness.
Wright’s Broadacre City of course makes an appearance, with a more positive interpretation than usual (from the book’s review in Toronto’s Globe and Mail):
And then there are the grandiose urban visions of two great modernist architects, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. Late in his life, Wright promoted a “Broadacre City” that would disperse the metropolis across a vast area, at a density of one family per acre, and scatter commerce endlessly toward the horizon. Jane Jacobs – whose defence of the dense, organic, pedestrian-oriented city gets a whole chapter here – was not impressed by any part of the “Radiant Garden City Beautiful.” Yet it was the dotty, cape-wearing Wright who came closest to predicting the future of the North American city: It’s not that far from Broadacre City to Phoenix. Rybczynski doesn’t think this is so bad. The markets have spoken, he tells us, and what Americans want is new-style “horizontal cities,” spread out and car-driven.
Two of his Slate columns that ran in November, “The Cities We Want” (Part 1 and Part 2, another photo essay) offer a preview of his ideas.
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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