Frank Lloyd Wright’s Forgotten Utopia

Some of the most famous architects are known for their brilliant designs and outspoken social, political, or societal viewpoints. Frank Lloyd Wright is one of the most well-known and influential American architects. His early twentieth-century "prairie school" style once served as the basis of residential design in America, and his urban utopian ideal, Broadacre City, served as a conceptual framework for redesigning human communities to align with the values and virtues of rural America that were inspired by agrarian republicanism.

Using the model of Broadacre City, Frank Lloyd Wright emerged as the voice of a distinctly organic American style of architecture. This kind of building was meant to express the "nature of the materials," calling for a radical revolution of American cultural aesthetics in design and a return to a prior, more virtuous state.[1] Broadacre City represented a utopian vision in its nearly perfect organization of community. Wright imagined a society where every person was given an acre of land, as the homestead was the foundational unit of civilization. In Wright's view, the government should be decentralized, and its authority should be minimized in allotting land and determining how buildings are constructed.[2] The prairie style was meant to reacquaint citizens with their personal freedoms and encourage self-reliance. By departing from crowded urban centers and finding the right balance of isolation and community support in rural areas, Broadacre City was thought to create a social, classless harmony among communities. People would be granted their rights to a fair medium of exchange and be given a place on the earth to use and improve, encouraging inventive ideas that benefited them.[3] In this envisioned space of remodeled land ownership, architecture would thrive. 

Since society was to be streamlined more efficiently for all citizens, every region would require simple, direct distribution routes within and between regions. Broadacre City's landscape would be driven by large-scale architectural plans to accommodate a new style and small-scale residential and community buildings that embody the same quality of style, purpose, and material.[4] Form and function would become one. Gardens and arboretums would be comprised of aesthetically pleasing and functionally valuable plants and trees. Houses would be made of synesthetic, safe materials. There would be no encouragement of urban-like, overpopulated, capitalistic principles, and these would likely disappear from disuse in a few generations.[5] As an applied architectural theory of reintegration of space and its people, Wright's utopian vision seemed too good to be true. Nevertheless, he persisted in sharing his modeled vision for an intentionally designed society. 

Broadacre City is not a city at all but rather an attempt to reconceptualize urban society in the absence of a city. Wright saw traditional cities as spaces of centralized forces that encouraged conformity and a loss of individuality. He valued the individual expression of freedom and the collective sense of belonging to a greater group.[6] At the heart of Broadacre City is the relationship between a person, their home, and the larger urban environment they inhabit. To support this intention, Broadacres's houses were geometrically and modularly designed to allow a balance between the house and the community in a method of "urban composition."[7] His architectural vision was for a "natural house" integrated into the landscape and surroundings as seamlessly as the trees. The architecture was created from within, Wright posed, which meant that structures adhered to guiding principles of the space, leading to the creation of free space inside Broadacres.[8] Wright's blend of individualistic and communal values was visible and literal but symbolic, positioning the person and family unit at the center of community designs.

Conceptualizing the idea was just the beginning of Wright's journey with Broadacre City. From there, the city needed to be physically modeled, presented, and verified. Roads posed a functional and structural challenge. To best utilize all spaces, Wright took full advantage of intersections and turned them into spaces of commercial or communal facilities.[9] In this sense, a person's public and private life were kept at the forefront of his creation. Presented more like an artistic work than an image that was capable of being consumed, Broadacres stood for Wright's vision of a future society. The model serves as a visual map of Wright's ideas for a unified world where people return to the land, and this represents humanity's next step of evolution, where the city itself takes on collective consciousness and urges its citizens to adopt a new mindset.[10] 

Another central aspect of Broadacre City is that it revives a sense of American agrarianism, drawing on the ideals of Jefferson's republicanism that champions yeomen farmers as foundational members of society, an idea still alive today in architecture. Even though Wright's model was never fully implemented, modern housing sprawl in the United States has followed a decentralized development pattern. While this is not the exact vision of Broadacre City, decentralized sprawl does indicate some of the negative economic, social, and environmental impacts that Wright pointed to in the New Urbanism.[11] If contemporary society resembled Wright's model, every person would have a hand cultivating the land. However, modern urbanites have lost a connection to their environments, as they are isolated in urban centers.[12] This lack of experience denies people of natural heritage and basic human needs to connect to the natural world. Wright attempts to rekindle this spirit of connectedness with nature in the post-war utopia called Broadacres.  

Some critics challenged Wright for overlooking the distinctions between post-World War II urban sprawl in the United States and Broadacre's utopian terrain. The intended relationship between people and the environment, central to Wright's dream, was not prioritized in the America he lived in.[13] Modern suburbia knows no such integration of the people and the environment, and his biophilic attitude was not woven into society. Wright believed that people benefitted through connections with nature, but these basic human needs were obscured by urban forms and infrastructure with little individual or collective value. These agrarian principles are still present within the American cultural fabric and not only in rural spaces.[14] Wright's utopian dream for American architecture is kept alive in urban planning that strives to reunite people with the natural world.

Others criticized Wright for not presenting a utopia at all but instead creating a framework to manage socio-spatial change. Considering the social context in which Broadacre City was born, Wright's plan can be seen as an attempt to strengthen suburban trends. First shared in 1930 as an American urban critique, Broadacres may not be a master plan as much as it represents a framework to negotiate and manage socioeconomic change.[15] Its goal was never implementation but to analyze and change the public discourse using the language of architecture. The design of Broadacres represents a conversation concerning current conditions, indicating a reorientation and reshaping of race, gender, and class. The early 1930s was an era of suburban expansion that brought changes in land use, transportation, and disruptive attitudes about the spatial needs and relationships between agriculture, industry, residences, and retail.[16] Wright modeled meaningful architectural perspectives of school locations, shared communal facilities, luxury spaces, and roadways. 

A sense of egalitarianism was embedded into the framework of Broadacres's design, and Wright attempted to create an "organic capitalism" that would thrive and represent alternatives to the laissez-faire forms that dominated the era. Culture and commerce became closely integrated. He designed multifunctional facilities like open-air markets with stalls for local produce, meat, and baked goods mixed in with restaurants, bakeries, cafes, beauty parlors, and other shops.[17] In the model, it was an elegant outline in support of socioeconomic equality, but in writing, Wright expresses other invisible sentiments not modeled in Broadacre City. Some have given greater attention to the rhetoric of social and economic prejudices in Wright's language about the project, making it seem less of a utopia and more of an integral piece of American architectural history.[18]

A country's architecture is a visible expression of its culture. Wright is considered the "greatest American architect" to ever live, and Broadacre City was one of his life's major technical, ideological, and structural works that symbolize American ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality.[19] His buildings are considered integral to American architecture. Of everything Wright created over a prolific career, Broadacres is one of his most ambitious creations, suggesting that the spirit of social advocacy never dies. He promoted the country's values in his work. Broadacre City is a show of freedom and democracy.[20] It is important to note that the freedom and democracy that Wright promoted were inspired by Thomas Jefferson. These were ideals to Wright as opposed to the lived experience of the political system that Jefferson belonged to and spoke out about in their defense. When architecture defends freedom and democracy, it organizes a landscape that promotes equality and a person's right to regain their inherent freedom.[21] 

Wright's architectural work came to represent the ideals of American democracy, and he was aware of this perception. Wright appealed widely to the media and created an image of "plain-speaking anti-collectivist democracy" that spoke through the design of Broadacre City.[22] Through the language of his architectural utopia, Wright criticized the values of land ownership, as he felt that this ethos contributed to social inequalities. He defined democracy and freedom in terms of organic architecture that allowed citizens to reconnect with their land in a way that rooted them in the specific freedom from the centralized rule of a city.[23] People should not be isolated and trapped in the cubicle-style neighborhoods of the American city and should not be isolated from their community or denied access to urban amenities and individualism in a social atmosphere of limited government control. Wright worked to instill these beliefs into his design of Broadacre City.  

Wright was an architect, but he was also an artist. His buildings captured the spirit of the ideals Jeffersonian Republicanism. Evidenced in Broadacre City, Wright felt the architect played a special role in creating positive societal changes. Wright spoke out against the motorcar, the telephone, and standardized production in machine shops.[24] Wright felt these technologies had been misused and proposed an alternative society where technologies would be better utilized. Technology should serve citizens by allowing them the freedom to work easily outside of rural centers. He did not fight the evolution of technology, instead, he showed how it could be better integrated to serve citizens' personal freedom and not forced onto people as a necessary means. Surely, citizens of Broadacre City should have the same option to walk to where they need to go rather than rely on public transportation or a vehicle. This is the greater freedom. 

As previously noted, nature and sustainability were essential parts of Wright's utopian framework. Wright referred to Broadacre City as "Usonian" since it represented the features of a new American landscape.[25] This forward-thinking vision included locally sourced materials, natural light, and alternative energy sources. Wright's ideas were undoubtedly influenced by his upbringing. Wright was inspired by his rural upbringing, and this experience certainly inspired the development of Broadacres. His home in the Wisconsin valley impressed upon him the virtues of tiny houses situated in nature, surrounded by fresh produce and trees. He brought these images to Broadacres City with the hopes of resolving the conflicts evident in crowded urban centers by integrating aspects of suburban life where people have a lot of space and are perhaps enclosed by nature, but they lack the advantage of dense city-like transportation and a sense of community.[26] His architectural design for freedom in Broadacres possibly stems from a nostalgia for a time and place where people could choose to live a sustainable life and were not forced into a conformist idea of how a person should live. 

Wright's understanding of technology deserves more attention in this discussion of nature and humanity. He often spoke and wrote about the automobile and its significance to his conception of Broadacres. Yet, his enthusiasm for this technology is rarely linked to his devotion to organic architecture. To Wright, the driving machine was not just another tool to create but was a true achievement, an expression of humanity.[27] The car symbolizes the essence of the world Wright tries to perfect in Broadacre City through the integration of a landscape that is both wild and civilized. From his perspective, to correct the abuse of technology and machinery in "enslaving humanity," the vehicle was to be intimately integrated into Broadacres as a helpful tool that served the great egalitarian goal.[28] Indeed, he designed the city around functional roadways that prioritized efficiency and the most direct route from distribution to retail. This architectural control of Broadacres's infrastructure served individual citizens and the collective. 

Wright had a unique understanding of the relationship between technology, society, and nature that served as the foundation for redesigning society according to the model utopian city of Broadacres. In his writing, he referred to technology as "the Machine" that overtook cities like a "monster leviathan" with a radiating roar so mighty that all of society was attuned to its beat.[29] In this way, technology drove a city's expansion into a methodical overgrowth and decline, as witnessed in industrial cities at the time. The city itself took on a Frankenstein-like characteristic of being part living organism and part crafted machine. For the artist and architect alike, the challenge was to bring the city to life. To do this, Wright designed a city that was worthy of the life it sustained for its own sake as well as for the sake of those who inhabited the space and made it truly alive.[30]

A final critique of Wright's well-developed architectural design of decentralized suburbanization comes from the way that Broadacre City was over-idealized as a tool for promoting democracy. Some argue that his conception undermined the possibility of genuinely democratic citizenship.[31] Wright called for radical reform that would enable society to provide the material conditions necessary to sustain a state of freedom and equality, and he architecturally intended to build that democracy upon a material foundation of a constructed environment that allowed democracy to unfold. Even though his suggestions may be lofty, his insistence that "democratic institutions and procedures" usually do not generate the material conditions that are needed to realize freedom and equality helped shift the relevant discourse.[32] Despite its shortcomings, Wright's theory brought in a new hierarchy of values for both theorists and architects to consider. 

Wright saw a clear line between the design of a socially leveled city and freedom and individuality. He believed that when the correct material conditions were met, individuality could develop "organically" from well-prepared soil.[33] The post-war industrial atmosphere that Wright saw as sprawling and smothering democratic principles represented a formidable opponent. When designing Broadacre City, architects became social leaders. In his grand design, he did not foresee the wave of consumerism that would overwhelm the utopian city's prized notions of self-reliance and individual production, and his vision ultimately lost out to an economy that reaffirmed its democracy by promoting mass consumption.[34] For all of his talent and vision, he could not redesign the American people who largely settled for the promise of democracy that lacked the necessary material substance to support it. 

In literature, utopian societies often fade quickly into dystopias. When Wright's ideal conception of Broadacre City, a space that allows individuals and collectives to reach their greatest potential from within a rekindled relationship with the natural world, is taken literally, much criticism arises. However, when one sees Wright's vision as a platform for radical societal change and a framework for necessary discussions of equality and freedom, then the architectural design at the heart of the new city can be fully appreciated.