Though Wright remains America’s most famous architect, his Broadacre theories are often relegated to a footnote of his career; indeed, many biographies don’t mention them at all. But what if the Broadacre plan—a sweeping, individualized American “anti-city” that fused Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian ideals into a seamless, Wright-designed, suburban landscape—was, in fact, the architect’s most enduring idea? [...]
Displayed in a huge scale model that was 12 feet square and eight inches high, Wright’s first Broadacre rendering showed what a low-density modern city could look like—if you removed nearly everything from it that was remotely urban. Most of the model was taken up by neatly gridded plots for what Wright would later term “minimum houses.” Areas were set aside for recreation and Wright envisioned a skyscraper or two for recovering city dwellers who couldn’t bear the thought of too much open space. Today, looking down at the Broadacre model from above, it resembles just about any American suburb; at first glance, it doesn’t seem radical at all. [...]
It was apparent from the start that while Wright was using the term “city” to describe Broadacre, he was actually creating, in the words of architecture critic Lewis Mumford, an “anti-city.” To critics like Mumford, a place like Broadacre City would destroy all that was good about urbanity. [...]
Even as suburbs developed following World War II—aided and abetted by the car, just as Wright had hoped—Wright couldn’t get a Broadacre concept off the ground. While many manufacturing jobs left large cities, the urban centers remained. Business districts weren’t replaced with a generation of homesteaders and at-home entrepreneurs. In fact, as people moved farther away from urban centers, Wright’s highways merely became conduits to move them in and out of cities each day—the “vain scramble in and scramble out” that Broadacre was supposed to solve.
