The Living City Research

Movies and Images of the Living City Created by the Columbia Digital Design Lab
http://brooklyn.arch.columbia.edu/DDL/projects/usonia/ddl.mov
http://www.arch.columbia.edu/DDL/projects/usonia/images.html
http://www.arch.columbia.edu/DDL/projects/usonia/copter1.mov

Ideas From Broadacre City With Possible Contemporary Relevance
The world of concentrated wealth and power would be replaced by one in which the means of production would be widely held.
City as Landscape = Suburban Sprawl
Self-Sufficient
DIY Network
Low Cost Housing
Cars = Freedom
Local Markets
City = Poverty + Pollution
Land Ownership = Democracy
Grow Food On Their Own Land
Build Their Own House
Green Republic
Architect Is The Only Bureaucrat
Single Family House
Auto-Dependent
Rent = All Ills of Contemporary City
Community Without Experts = Everyone Does Everything
Wright advocated a curious monetary reform, which had first been proposed by the Swiss economist Silvio Gesell at the turn of the century. He therefore proposed to make money perishable: a banknote issued at the beginning of the year would lose a fixed percentage of its face value by the end of the year. This would prevent hoarding, encourage spending, and reduce interest to a minimum. Wright’s enthusiasm for this monetary “reform” does little for his reputation as an economist, but it does reveal an important aspect of Broadacre City. Wright had in mind an organic order in which every living thing has a place and shape all its own, and yet contributes to the harmony of the whole.

http://www.mediaarchitecture.at/architekturtheorie/broadacre_city/2007_broadacre_city_en.shtml

Broadacre's vast suburban landscape, seemingly scattered across an entire continent, anticipates the prevailing urban context, that eventually will shape the condition of architecture. With hindsight BROADACRE CITY (1932-1958) appears premonitory of current states. An assessment that still adds to the accumulative aura surrounding its initiator FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT (1867-1959).

Broadacre City, Frank Lloyd Wright's urban utopia for the U.S. continues to intrigue, as illustrated by Columbia University students in 1997. Their computer animation renders Wright's vision according to drawings entitled "THE LIVING CITY", published first in 1958.

1932 - 26 years earlier, at the age of 65, Frank Lloyd Wright has reached the end of his first carrier. Two years without commissions affect his finances badly, though the true personal and economical calamities of his life already lie behind him. 

At the time (1932) Philip Johnson says of Frank Lloyd Wright: "He is the greatest architect of the 19.th century." VI.) 1 

An insult, triggered off by the generation gap, but also by Wright's architecture. The International Style (named after a noted exhibition in same year, featuring Wright at MOMA - New York X.) 7) spearheads the Avant-Garde. Modernism has changed since Unity Temple 1906, Robie House 1908 and Imperial Hotel 1915-21. 
Wright is deemed an outsider.

Europe sets the stage for Wright's comeback. Le Corbusier formulates his ideas for the future, designing a contemporary city for 3 million inhabitants. In 1922 the principles are clear. This city is dense, rational, organised; to put it in a nutshell - urban.

Wright's answer is as radical as it is diametrically opposed. Broadacre isn't a city; it is a landscape. Decentralised in organisation it is self-sufficient in supply, republican in constitution, and populated by auto - mobile citizens. 

Centred on the homestead, the single family house, Broadacre sprawls. 

Wright lives this Arcadian lifestyle with his apprentices he gathers around him. The "Taliesin Fellowship" puts the green republic to the test. Their aim is to pursue happiness
Wright perceives himself and his rebellion as "an army under siege". The atmosphere in Taliesin at the time is described like this: 

"It was not a civilized situation - it was a heroic one." VI.) 2

From this milieu emerges the plan for a community laying out their cities according to family values, spirituality and knowledge. 

Everyone owns land for cultivation, at least one acre (4046,8m2, 165 by 264 Feet). The model plan covers four square miles.

Property is the economic basis. 
Market economy - yes, but in the shape of trade by barter between proprietors. (Rent is synonymous for all ills in the contemporary city.) XI.) 8

Economy is considered to work like an agricultural fair. Its site is the huge marketplace.

Broadacre is a community without experts. Everyone does everything. Everyone's a farmer - industrial worker - artist: reminiscence of the "Arts and Crafts" movement from Wright's beginnings.

The ideal for labour is self-fulfilment.

There is no administration - no bureaucracy - but the architect, who plans the city and settles its affairs. He arranges who may own how many acres of land and where roads start and lead to, thus preventing property speculation as well as congestion.

Broadacre is a continuous metropolitan region of low density. Areas designated to serve similar purposes are allocated functionally (parallel along traffic systems of more than regional importance like monorail and motorway): 
trade, entertainment, industry, agriculture, housing etc.. Arrangements are selective - idealized - but not exclusive.

The city starts with the single family house. Due to Broadacre's economical logic it is being built by oneself (in a DIY network). 
Using standardized elements and partly prefabricated building modules it is fairly extendable (in Wright's terms "organic"). But first of all it is affordable, although money has almost no relevance in Broadacre

The Usonian House as a typology evolves.Å
Wright time and time again takes up the concept for simple, cheap "low-cost-housing". Such as American System-Built Houses 1911-17 (American System Ready-Cut), Quadruple Block Plan 1900, or Suntop Houses 1939-40. 
Several alternative variations result from the Willey Houses, of which some actually get built. The propagated cost limit of 5000 dollars however, was never kept. [ ...]

Mobility and information conveying systems are prerequisites for Broadacre. 

In 1935 Wright esteems the importance of "communication machines" as follows:

"Everywhere the voice and sight of men cause distances to vanish - they permeate through walls. Wherever citizens walk (in fact while they're walking), information, housing and entertainment are provided. Whatever one needs or inquires, it's always made available easily."

The notion of an aircraft in everyone's front yard is a convincing image. (Illustration 13) Total mobility is inevitable.


The road is a symbol of individual freedom. Cars aren't simply contemporary or modern, they represent democracy itself. The technology to cross and to communicate long distance facilitates: 

air, light and freedom of movement. IX.)

Expansions are in vogue, at least in America. 'Democracity' Abb. 15 is on display at the New York World's Fair V.) 8 in 1939.
Resolving the volume of traffic as well as coming to terms with prosperity shift focus. Horizontality and mobility are at the centre of attention in master plan simulations of the time.

By World War II at the latest, "The future isn't what it used to be." V.) 5

Instead of improving social order to achieve happiness for mankind, we apply technology to do so. Before, the new society guaranteed to handle progress reasonably - now advanced technology and science (considered an instrument to control these advancements) are trusted to solve the contradictions of current states.

Science Fiction replaces Utopia

By 1958 Broadacre remaines true to its socioeconomic concept, but generates different images. It sells via monuments, Frank Lloyd Wright's monuments.
The 'aerotor' becomes a trademark.


Wright's ensemble of monuments is brought to life in 1958 by drawings that have shaped the conclusive 'image' of Broadacre City 
- representing the work of a lifetime:

Butterfly Bridge, Spring Green, Wisconsin 1947

Rogers Lacy Hotel, Dallas 1946-47

Beth Sholom Synagoge, Pensilvania 1953-59

Twin Suspension Bridges and Community Center, Pittsburgh 1947

Huntington Hartford Play Resort, Hollywood 1947

Self Service Garage, Pittsburgh 1947 
(To the right of illustration 20; click image to enlarge)

Gordon Strong Automobil Objective, Maryland 1925

Marin County Civic Centre, San Rafael, California, 1957 - 70 
(In the background of illustration 20 between c, b and e; as well as an inspiration in illustration 21)
[...]

Still, the concluding statement in Robert Fishman's 1977 analysis of Broadacre City constitutes the keenest critique possible. 

"The Plan was democratic not because it had been debated in a legislature or approved in an election, but because it was representative of the nations deepest feelings.

http://www.designboom.com/portrait/wright.html

‘the living city’
in 1935, frank lloyd wright constructed a large model
called ‘broadacre city’ that he presented as a scheme
for the reordering of the urban landscape.
the oxymoronic name given to this city of the future
emphasizes its key feature: the breakdown of the
dichotomy between city and country.
wright was one of the first to perceive that the advent
of the automobile had rendered obsolete the dense,
insalubrious human concentration characteristic of the
nineteenth-century city.
he proposed a decentralized plan in which the necessary
functions and services of modern life would be distributed
over the landscape interspersed with farms and wooded
areas.
near the end of his life, wright returned to this concept.
he wrote a book
'the living city' (horizon press, new york 1958),
illustrated with drawings into which he integrated many of
his realized buildings and unbuilt projects,
was intended as a blueprint for the future.

http://www.lovolution.net/MainPages/arcology/gatesarco1.htm

Wright was appalled with the urban centralization that has resulted in cities of poverty and pollution tied to an economic system that he thought was based on the feudal system of plutocratic Europe. In order to break free of these constrains, he thought that society should decentralize. With the use of automobiles, everyone could own his [sic] own house and acre of land. He writes, “When every man, woman, and child may be born to put his feet on his own acres and every unborn child finds his acre waiting for him when he is born—then democracy will have been realized.” For Wright, democracy meant individual sovereignty supported by a “City of Broad Acres” connecting people to the land and to each other through the automobile. His goal was to decentralize the urban areas since he thought the evils of civilization were occurring because densely populated areas disconnected people from the topography. Such centralized urban areas allowed for the accumulation of wealth by a few landlords.

http://www.accd.edu/sac/honors/main/papers%2004/Campos/broadacre.html

Broadacre City Project

Broadacre city was presented to the world in model form in March 1935, ironically right in the heart of monopoly capitalism, and the urban congestion around- New York’s Rockefeller Center. The new city was to be New York reversed, spread out to the point that it would be ‘everywhere and nowhere’, thus overcoming, as Marxism demanded, the contradiction would overcome by the new communication techniques – telephone, radio, later TV- the new light industries and home industry. Broadacres resemble the ‘back-to-the Farm’ movements of the Depression, and indeed today’s urban economic unit. Was to have control of the one acre to supply their minimal eating habits, and were to build their house, largely by themselves, from easy-to –assemble prefabricated parts. The basic home for Broadacres was the ‘Usonian House’-Usonian because it was to be very USA, very nationalistic, and something you could build yourself for $5,000 (Jencks 46). Although Wright believed in capitalism, he thought that the land, the means of production and social credit-the capital itself- should be distributed, not concentrated into monopolies. ‘Little farms, little homes for industry, little homes for industry, little schools, a little university and little laboratories’ was the way American Marxist characterized the decentralization. ‘Small is beautiful’ was to become a later slogan for many of the same ideas, including ‘appropriate technology’. Suffice it to say that Wright was promoting Jeffersonian ideas of agrarian democracy and freedom, the spirit of tradition as he saw it in 1935, and if these ideas have been co-opted by the consumer society and turned into the worst excesses of suburbia they are, nonetheless, its hopeful signs.


While Broadacre City was never built, except in fragments (isolated Wrightian monuments or houses), the Johnson Wax Administration Building, an interesting social experiment, was completed (Jencks 48). Wright’s model of Broadacre City there is no recognizable center, no point at which the natural world gives way to an environment dominated by man. In Broadacre city decentralization reaches the point at which the urban/rural distinction no longer exists. The men-made environment is distributed over the open countryside until its structures appear to be natural, “organic” parts of the landscape. He believed the metropolis with its centralized institutions was the greatest embodiment of progress but the greatest barrier to it. He saw the big city as a monstrous aberration built by greed, destructive both efficient production and to human values. Broadacre City, he announced was not just the destiny of a mature industrial society. It was” the plastic form of a genuine democracy”(Fisherman 92-94). As he expanded his plan for a new Usonian city that became Broadacre city, he described his reasoning to his philosophy.

He believed, it was inevitable, in the age of the automobile and the telephone the great cities were doomed they were “no longer modern.” He assumed that modern man had an inherited right to own a car and to burn as much gasoline in driving it as he desired. He knew only that the automobile had created the possibility of new communities based on a new mastery of time and space. The world of concentrated wealth and power would be replaced by one in which the means of production would be widely held. Wright believed that the psychology of urban life was as dangerous to the nation’s mental health as urban economics was to its physical well being. He summed up his analysis of evil of the city in the term ”Rent,” Wright’s word for exploitation. He distinguished the forms: rent for land, rent for money (interest), and rent for ideas (control of inventions). All three are the support of the “vicarious in the economic sense because it is based on labor of others, and vicarious psychology because the renter can have no sense of himself as a productive individual. In Broadacre city is the place where there is no Rent.

The means to this end was the reforming of the environment through the abolition of rent for land (Fisherman 124-125). His plans for Broadacre City clearly presupposed legislation that would expropriate all landholdings larger than any one family would need. Everyone would have an absolute right to the area he used and improved. (We should remember that, given Wright’s prescription of an acre of land per person, the entire population of the United States in 1930 could have fitted comfortably inside the State of Texas.) Neither banks nor the government could challenge the individual’s claim to his homestead (Fisherman 127). Wright sought to eliminate any rigid specialization of Broadacre City citizens into farm workers, factory workers, or office workers. In Broadacre city both physical and mental labor would be part of everyone’s daily experience. Everyone would have the skills to be a part-time farmer, a part-time mechanic, and a part-time intellectual (Fisherman 128). The worker would cease to be a property less proletarian. On his own land he could never be “unemployed or a slave to anyone.” This independence increased his economic power even when he was working part-time for others. Since he could live by his own labor if necessary, he did not have to summit to exploitative wages or poor working conditions. The solutions to all social problems rest on its capacity to create its own world of stability, prosperity, and love. It is the one wholly independent unit in society; its members are expected to spend the bulk of their time living and working together (Fisherman 130). He believed that factories in Broadacre city could be either privately or cooperatively owned.

The important factor was that they be small and located within convenient driving distance of the homesteaders who were employed in them. H e supported the limited measure of inequality: the houses he designed for Broadacre city ranged in size from ”one-car houses” to “ five-car houses”. Strict equality, he held, would threaten individuality, but no family could be true homesteaders if they were too poor to afford one car or rich enough to maintain more than five. Within these limits there was no rigid hierarchy because “quality is in all, for all, alike…there is nothing poor or mean anywhere in Broadacre”(Fisherman 131). In Broadacre City, credit would be decentralized; everyone could command the resources to set himself up as an independent farmer or businessman. To accomplish this goal, Wright advocated a curious monetary reform, which had first been proposed by the Swiss economist Silvio Gesell at the turn of the century. He therefore proposed to make money perishable: a banknote issued at the beginning of the year would lose a fixed percentage of its face value by the end of the year. This would prevent hoarding, encourage spending, and reduce interest to a minimum. Wright’s enthusiasm for this monetary “reform” does little for his reputation as an economist, but it does reveal an important aspect of Broadacre City. Wright had in mind an organic order in which every living thing has a place and shape all its own, and yet contributes to the harmony of the whole.

Lastly Wright’s concept of natural economic order found architectural expression in his plan for “ the great Roadside Market.” In Broadacre city there were no department stores or “congested crowds senselessly swarming in from the country on to hard pavement and back again.” Instead, at a junction of two highways, there was a permanent “Country Fair” under a huge shed. The Roadside Market brought together under one roof the multitude of small transactions in a decentralized economy. Each producer had his own stall. There the small farmer sold his fresh products, the craftsman his handiwork, the manufacturer his articles of machine production. Close by were cabarets, cafes, and good restaurants. As Wright commented, the Roadside Market would be “ the most attractive, educational and entreating single modern unit to be found among all the features of the Broadacre City. In the natural economy of Broadacre city they apportion abundance. Where poverty and class conflict have been overcome, competition loses it grim, destructive aspect.