city reader-5th-05-c 6/12/10 15:15 Page 345

“Broadacre City:
A New Community Plan”
Architectural Record (1935)

Frank Lloyd Wright

Editors’ Introduction
For more than half a century, the question “Who is the greatest American architect?” could have only one answer:
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959). First with his revolutionary “prairie houses” that seemed to grow directly out of
the Midwest landscape with their long, low cantilevered rooflines, and later with such masterpieces as the Imperial
Hotel in Tokyo, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the breathtaking “Fallingwater” house in Western
Pennsylvania, Wright became the spokesman for “organic architecture” and a style of building that expressed “the
nature of the materials.”
To many, Wright’s architecture and “the architecture of American democracy” were synonymous. As an
unabashed egotist and a pioneer in the field of media celebrity, Wright encouraged the popular identification of
himself with the American spirit. He cultivated an imperious image of plain-speaking, anti-collectivist democracy
and sought personally to embody the notion of radical individualism. As an artistic genius, Wright despised the
popular philistinism of his day and attributed the observable decline of American popular culture to “the mobocracy”
and to the unprincipled bankers and politicians who served its interests. By the 1920s and 1930s, Wright had
become a social revolutionary but not, characteristically, of the socialist Left. Rather, Wright called for a radical
transformation of American society to restore earlier Emersonian and Jeffersonian virtues. The physical embodiment
of that utopian vision was Broadacre City. Wright unveiled his model of Broadacre City, illustrated in Plate 39, at
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Rockefeller Center, New York, in 1935. The article reprinted here represents his first and clearest statement of
the revolutionary proposal whereby every citizen of the United States would be given a minimum of one acre of
land per person, with the family homestead being the basis of civilization, and with government reduced to nothing
more than a county architect who would be in charge of directing land allotments and the construction of basic
community facilities. Many at the time thought the idea was totally outlandish, but Broadacre (and the small,
efficient “Usonian” house) proved to be prophetic as sprawling suburban regions transformed the American
landscape during the second half of the twentieth century.
Wright believed that two inventions – the telephone and the automobile – made the old cities “no longer
modern,” and he fervently looked forward to the day when dense, crowded agglomerations like New York and
Chicago would wither and decay. In their place, Americans would reinhabit the rural landscape (and reacquire the
rural virtues of individual freedom and self-reliance) with a “city” of independent homesteads in which people
would be isolated enough from one another to insure family stability but connected enough, through modern
telecommunications and transportation, to achieve a real sense of community. Borrowing an idea from the anarchist
philosopher Kropotkin, Wright believed that the citizens of Broadacre should pursue a combination of manual and
intellectual work every day, thus achieving a human wholeness that modern society and the modern city had
destroyed. He also believed that a system of personal freedom and dignity through land ownership was the way
to guarantee social harmony and avoid class struggle. Broadacre City invites immediate comparison with the very

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346 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

different models of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City (p. 328) and with Le Corbusier’s cities based on towers in
a park (p. 336). Intriguingly, the overall population density of Broadacre, on the one hand, and the Garden City
and Corbusian visions, on the other, were not all that different, depending on the actual acreage of the surrounding
parkland or greenbelt. Both Wright’s and Le Corbusier’s plans are wedded to the automobile, one vision seeing
a centralizing, the other a decentralizing, effect. But the most revealing comparisons are with Robert Fishman’s
description of the post-suburban “technoburbs” (p. 75), Melvin Webber’s prediction of a “post-urban age” (p. 549),
and Manuel Castells’s concept of “the space of flows” (p. 572). Considering the nature of the global cities
described in Part Eight of this volume, one cannot help but wonder whether what Wright envisioned in 1935 may
actually be realized, with the help of computer-based telecommunications and the possibility of “telecommuting”
to work over the Internet in the twenty-first century.
This selection is from Architectural Record, 77 (April, 1935). For more on Broadacre City see Robert Fishman,
Urban Utopias of the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1977). John Sergeant, Frank Lloyd Wright’s
Usonian Houses: The Case for Organic Architecture (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1984) is also useful,
and William Allin Storer, A Frank Lloyd Wright Companion (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994) is
an impressive and definitive reference book.
Three excellent biographies of Wright are Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1998), Brendan Gill, Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Da
Capo Press, 1998), and Ada Louise Huxtable, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life (New York: Viking, 2004). For good
overviews of Wright’s work, see David Larkin and Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (eds), Frank Lloyd Wright: The
Masterworks (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), Neil Levine, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1996), and Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman, The Fellowship: The Untold Story
of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship (New York: Regan, 2006). The very best sources on Wright
are Wright himself, although his writing style is often quirky and hyperbolic. Of particular interest are When
Democracy Builds (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1945), Genius and the Mobocracy (New York:
Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1949), and The Living City (New York: Horizon, 1958).

Given the simple exercise of several inherently just are absent except where planting and cultivation are
rights of man, the freedom to decentralize, to re- naturally a process or walls afford a desired seclusion.
distribute and to correlate the properties of the life Rhythm is the substitute for such repetitions every-
of man on earth to his birthright – the ground itself where. Wherever repetition (standardization) enters,
– and Broadacre City becomes reality. it has been modified by inner rhythms either by art
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

As I see Architecture, the best architect is he or by nature as it must, to be of any lasting human
who will devise forms nearest organic as features of value.
human growth by way of changes natural to that The three major inventions already at work building
growth. Civilization is itself inevitably a form but not, if Broadacres, whether the powers that over-built the old
democracy is sanity, is it necessarily the fixation called cities otherwise like it or not, are:
“academic.” All regimentation is a form of death which
1 The motor car: general mobilization of the human
may sometimes serve life but more often imposes upon
being.
it. In Broadacres all is symmetrical but it is seldom
2 Radio, telephone and telegraph: electrical inter-
obviously and never academically so.
communication becoming complete.
Whatever forms issue are capable of normal growth
3 Standardized machine-shop production: machine
without destruction of such pattern as they may have.
invention plus scientific discovery.
Nor is there much obvious repetition in the new city.
Where regiment and row serve the general harmony The price of the major three to America has been
of arrangement both are present, but generally, both the exploitation we see everywhere around us in waste

Copyright 1935, 1943, 1999, 2002 the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizona.

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city reader-5th-05-c 6/12/10 15:15 Page 347

“BROADACRE CITY: A NEW COMMUNITY PLAN” 347

and in ugly scaffolding that may now be thrown away. traffic above and monorail speed trains at the center,
The price has not been so great if by way of popular continuously running. Because traffic may take off or
government we are able to exercise the use of three take on at any given point, these arterials are traffic
inherent rights of any man: not dated but fluescent. And the great arterial as well
as all the highways become great architecture, auto-
1 His social right to a direct medium of exchange in matically affording within their structure all necessary
place of gold as a commodity: some form of social storage facilities of raw materials, the elimination of all
credit. unsightly piles of raw material.
2 His social right to his place on the ground as he has In the hands of the state, but by way of the county,
had it in the sun and air: land to be held only by use is all redistribution of land – a minimum of one acre
and improvements. going to the childless family and more to the larger
3 His social right to the ideas by which and for which family as effected by the state. The agent of the state
he lives: public ownership of invention and scientific in all matters of land allotment or improvement,
discoveries that concern the life of the people. or in matters affecting the harmony of the whole, is
the architect. All building is subject to his sense of the
The only assumption made by Broadacres as ideal is whole as organic architecture. Here architecture
that these three rights will be the citizen’s so soon as the is landscape and landscape takes on the character
folly of endeavoring to cheat him of their democratic of architecture by way of the simple process of
values becomes apparent to those who hold (feudal cultivation.
survivors or survivals), as it is becoming apparent to All public utilities are concentrated in the hands of
the thinking people who are held blindly abject or the state and county government as are matters of
subject against their will. administration, patrol, fire, post, banking, license and
The landlord is no happier than the tenant. The record, making politics a vital matter to everyone in
speculator can no longer win much at a game about the new city instead of the old case where hopeless
played out. The present success-ideal, placing, as it indifference makes “politics” a grafter’s profession. F
does, premiums upon the wolf, the fox and the rat In the buildings for Broadacres no distinction exists I
V
in human affairs and above all, upon the parasite, is between much and little, more and less. Quality is in E
growing more evident every day as a falsity just as all, for all, alike. The thought entering into the first
injurious to the “successful” as to the victims of such or last estate is of the best. What differs is only
success. Well – sociologically, Broadacres is release individuality and extent. There is nothing poor or mean
from all that fatal “success” which is, after all, only in Broadacres.
excess. So I have called it a new freedom for living Nor does Broadacres issue any dictum or see any
in America. It has thrown the scaffolding aside. It sets finality in the matter either of pattern or style.
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

up a new ideal of success. Organic character is style. Such style has myriad
In Broadacres, by elimination of cities and towns forms inherently good. Growth is possible to Broad-
the present curse of petty and minor officialdom, acres as a fundamental form, not as mere accident of
government, has been reduced to one minor govern- change but as integral pattern unfolding from within.
ment for each county. The waste motion, the back and Here now may be seen the elemental units of our
forth haul, that today makes so much idle business is social structure [Figure 1]: the correlated farm, the
gone. Distribution becomes automatic and direct, factory – its smoke and gases eliminated by burning
taking place mostly in the region of origin. Methods of coal at places of origin, the decentralized school, the
distribution of everything are simple and direct. From various conditions of residence, the home offices, safe
the maker to the consumer by the most direct route. traffic, simplified government. All common interests
Coal (one-third the tonnage of the haul of our take place in a simple coordination wherein all are
railways) is eliminated by burning it at the mines and employed: little farms, little homes for industry, little
transferring that power, making it easier to take over factories, little schools, a little university going to the
the great railroad rights of way; to take off the cumber- people mostly by way of their interest in the ground,
some rolling stock and put the right of way into general little laboratories on their own ground for professional
service as the great arterial on which truck traffic is men. And the farm itself, notwithstanding its animals,
concentrated on lower side lanes, many lanes of speed becomes the most attractive unit of the city. The

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348 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

Figure 1
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husbandry of animals at last is in decent association In an organic architecture the ground itself pre-
with them and with all else as well. True farm relief. determines all features; the climate modifies them;
To build Broadacres as conceived would auto- available means limit them; function shapes them.
matically end unemployment and all its evils forever. Form and function are one in Broadacres. But
There would never be labor enough nor could under- Broadacres is no finality! The model shows four square
consumption ever ensue. Whatever a man did would miles of a typical countryside developed on the acre as
be done – obviously and directly – mostly by himself in unit according to conditions in the temperate zone and
his own interest under the most valuable inspiration accommodating some 1,400 families. It would swing
and direction: under training, certainly, if necessary. north or swing south in type as conditions, climate and
Economic independence would be near, a subsistence topography of the region changed.
certain; life varied and interesting. In the model the emphasis has been placed upon
Every kind of builder would be likely to have a diversity in unity, recognizing the necessity of culti-
jealous eye to the harmony of the whole within broad vation as a need for formality in most of the planting.
limits fixed by the county architect, an architect chosen By a simple government subsidy certain specific acres
by the county itself. Each county would thus naturally or groups of acre units are, in every generation, planted
develop an individuality of its own. Architecture – in to useful trees, meantime beautiful, giving privacy
the broad sense – would thrive. and various rural divisions. There are no rows of trees

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“BROADACRE CITY: A NEW COMMUNITY PLAN” 349

alongside the roads to shut out the view. Rows where costs to a certainty. There is the professional’s house
they occur are perpendicular to the road or the trees with its laboratory, the minimum house with its work-
are planted in groups. Useful trees like white pine, shop, the medium house ditto, the larger house and the
walnut, birch, beech, fir, would come to maturity as well house of machine-age luxury. We might speak of them
as fruit and nut trees and they would come as a as a one-car house, a two-car house, a three-car house
profitable crop meantime giving character, privacy and and a five-car house. Glass is extensively used as are
comfort to the whole city. The general park is a roofless rooms. The roof is used often as a trellis or a
flowered meadow beside the stream and is bordered garden. But where glass is extensively used it is usually
with ranks of trees, tiers gradually rising in height above for domestic purposes in the shadow of protecting
the flowers at the ground level. A music-garden is overhangs.
sequestered from noise at one end. Much is made of Copper for roofs is indicated generally on the model
general sports and festivals by way of the stadium, as a permanent cover capable of being worked in many
zoo, aquarium, arboretum and the arts. appropriate ways and giving a general harmonious
The traffic problem has been given special attention, color effect to the whole.
as the more mobilization is made a comfort and a Electricity, oil and gas are the only popular fuels.
facility the sooner will Broadacres arrive. Every Broad- Each land allotment has a pit near the public lighting
acre citizen has his own car. Multiple-lane highways fixture where access to the three and to water and
make travel safe and enjoyable. There are no grade sewer may be had without tearing up the pavements.
crossings nor left turns on grade. The road system and The school problem is solved by segregating a
construction is such that no signals nor any lamp-posts group of low buildings in the interior spaces of the
need be seen. No ditches are alongside the roads. city where the children can go without crossing traffic.
No curbs either. An inlaid purfling over which the car The school building group includes galleries for loan
cannot come without damage to itself takes its place collections from the museum, a concert and lecture
to protect the pedestrian. hall, small gardens for the children in small groups and
In the affair of air transport Broadacres rejects the well-lighted cubicles for individual outdoor study: F
present airplane and substitutes the self-contained there is a small zoo, large pools and green play- I
V
mechanical unit that is sure to come: an aerator cap- grounds. E
able of rising straight up and by reversible rotors This group is at the very center of the model and
able to travel in any given direction under radio con- contains at its center the higher school adapted to the
trol at a maximum speed of, say, 200 miles an hour, segregation of the students into small groups.
and able to descend safely into the hexacomb from This tract of four miles square, by way of such
which it arose or anywhere else. By a doorstep if liberal general allotment determined by acreage and
desired. type of ground, including apartment buildings and
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

The only fixed transport trains kept on the arterial hotel facilities, provides for about 1,400 families at, say,
are the long-distance monorail cars traveling at a speed an average of five or more persons to the family.
(already established in Germany) of 220 miles per To reiterate: the basis of the whole is general de-
hour. All other traffic is by motor car on the twelve centralization as an applied principle and architectural
lane levels or the triple truck lanes on the lower levels reintegration of all units into one fabric; free use of the
which have on both sides the advantage of delivery ground held only by use and improvements; public
direct to warehousing or from warehouses to con- utilities and government itself owned by the people
sumer. Local trucks may get to warehouse-storage on of Broadacre City; privacy on one’s own ground for
lower levels under the main arterial itself. A local truck all and a fair means of subsistence for all by way of
road parallels the swifter lanes. their own work on their own ground or in their own
Houses in the new city are varied: make much of laboratory or in common offices serving the life of the
fireproof synthetic materials, factory-fabricated units whole.
adapted to free assembly and varied arrangement, but There are too many details involved in the model of
do not neglect the older nature-materials wherever Broadacres to permit complete explanation. Study
they are desired and available. House-holders’ utilities of the model itself is necessary study. Most details are
are nearly all planned in prefabricated utility stacks or explained by way of collateral models of the various
units, simplifying construction and reducing building types of construction shown: highway construction, left

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350 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

turns, crossovers, underpasses and various houses and Individuality established on such terms must thrive.
public buildings. Unwholesome life would get no encouragement and
Anyone studying the model should bear in the ghastly heritage left by over-crowding in overdone
mind the thesis upon which the design has been built ultra-capitalistic centers would be likely to disappear in
by the Taliesin Fellowship, built carefully not as a three or four generations. The old success ideals having
finality in any sense but as an interpretation of the no chance at all, new ones more natural to the best in
changes inevitable to our growth as a people and a man would be given a fresh opportunity to develop
nation. naturally.
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