BROADACRE CITY: FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT'S UTOPIA

Author(s): James Dougherty

Source: The Centennial Review , SUMMER 1981, Vol. 25, No. 3 (SUMMER 1981), pp. 239-
256
Published by: Michigan State University Press

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 BROADACRE CITY:

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT'S UTOPIA

James Dougherty

for the last thirty years of his long life, Fra

work was directed by his vision of an ideal city
City. Though primarily a domestic architect
rural Wisconsin and the Arizona desert, he
city. In The Disappearing City (1932) he pro
megalopolis soon would begin to disappear, ab
city invisible because it would extend over
In 1935 he and the apprentices of his Taliesin
bled a twelve-foot-square model of a represe
Broadacre City, a model displayed first in R
and then in other exhibitions in America an
1940's he revised and expanded his book on t
When Democracy Builds. His last book, The L
amplified once more his vision of a new for
Because of the idealism of his plan, and bec
from political programs, Wright's visionary
missed as Utopian; but part of his dream ha
"utopian" will not serve to dismiss the rest of
Decentralization is the first principle of Br
plan would redistribute the population of Ame
the continent, affording every citizen at least
— more if warranted by climate or persona
Wright endowed owning and tilling land wit
i The Disappearing City (New York: William Farquhar Pa
City: A New Community Plan," The Architectural Record, 77
"Broadacre City," The American Architect, 146 (May 1935),
Builds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945); The Liv
York: The New American Library, 1970). I am grateful to th
Lloyd Wright Fellowship for letting me examine the Bro
Spring Green, Wisconsin, and to Charles Montooth of the Fel
with me.

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 THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

tique once invoked by Jefferson and Crév

yearn for a nation of simple cultivators, unif
ment of a decent but minimum competenc
tain all the diversity of urban life, scatteri
scrapers across the landscape, providing r
local centers of culture, entertainment, an
further provides for diversity in mode of lif
on single-acre plots, small farms with mor
luxury housing near country clubs; sing
plexes, small and large apartment buildings. B
he insists; telecommunications and conveni
have altered the scale according to which w
pinquity. A man's neighborhood may me
across, but within it he will find all the be
life. And yet within it are none of the evi
overcrowding, the traffic, the alienation f
tive work, the social and economic oppr
Wright associated with the present concentra
and with the economic and political interests
crats — that thrive upon a concentrated popu
city, machines use men, and devour them.
use machines to enhance their own freedom
new America "Usonia."

This vision of a garden city, where work does not enslave m

to machine, certainly seems indebted to late-nineteenth-centu
Utopian novels by Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward), Sa
Butler (Erewhon), and William Morris (News from Nowh
all of whom Wright mentions in his essays. And a manifest l
of specifics about how politically to accomplish this redist
tion of land, population and industry has led unfriendly cr
to label his city as a utopia. Morton and Lucia White so c
it, as they dismissed Wright as yet another of those Ame
intellectuals unable to come to terms with the city.2 Rob
Fishman more sympathetically associated Broadacres with
Mannheim's definition of utopia as "a coherent program
action arising out of thought that 'transcends the immed
situation' "; however, Fishman noted that Wright proposed
2The Intellectual vs. the City (1962; rpt. New York: The New American Lib
1964), p. 199.

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 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

scheme to mediate between his transcendent

reality.3

A recent review of forty years' reaction to B

tects and planners noted that Wright's des
severely criticized by those whose views of
fore 1969, while younger planners have begu
the diffused city, however unworkable as a un
design, is nevertheless a socio-economic fac
such western cities as Phoenix and Los A
periphery of every other American city.4 The
of low-density housing, industrial parks, an
(now known as shopping malls) is not a vision,
Jane Jacobs' and Lewis Mumford's dense, v
city neighborhoods are rapidly becoming
talgic — perhaps Utopian. Wright himself u
The Living City claiming that his city was n
"my interest lies in sincerely appraising . .
I see existing or surely coming." "The free
already here all around us in the haphaz
about us and no plan." "America needs no
City. It will haphazard build itself. Why no
Decentralization indeed we have; in that r
proved to be not a Utopian, but a prophet.
do not have. The diffusion of the American
only the spoliation of farmland and village,
of housing whose pretensions as architectur
are false beyond any horror that Wright at
could have foreseen. And while Wright h
"regional markets" would foster an indigeno
intead today's shopping malls thrive on a ho
of chains and franchises, circumscribing and
3Urban Utopias of the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic
John Sergeant disagrees, arguing in Frank Lloyd Wright's U
Whitney Library of Design, 1976), that Wright was firmly in
thinking of the 1930's.

^Stephen Grabow, "Frank Lloyd Wright and the American

bate," The Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 4
also Sergeant, pp. 129-134.

5pp. 230, 120, 159.

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 THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

needs. Further, the recent diffusion of me

largely residential, imposing on suburba
den of vacuous commutation from which
Road has altogether vanished. To look at
today in Taliesin in Wisconsin is to see
landscape, a dream of decentralization co
the explanatory notices accompanying t
Wright's books, is to discover that the p
only the bodying-forth of an inner, spirit
consequent socio-economic revolution, th
been accomplished.
Such a revolution, Wright acknowledge
coming. But, he said, "We can have a goo
time by way of good architects working
We may have valuable exemplars without
mass to come along."6 From the 1930's on
of his commissioned buildings, especially
exemplars.7 Oneida and New Harmony, i
America, had been conceived also as the y
society might be leavened; that Wright sh
dwellings, not small communities, as his ex
his own practice as a domestic architect a
of the home in his ideal city: "The true c
ization allowable) in Usonian democracy
his true Usonian family home."8 But mor
sense of a correspondence between the indi
his city, an identity in form which it is th
to discover and to enhance. In that ident
the role of the architect, we find the tr
utopianism.
«Baker Brownell and Frank Lloyd Wright, Architecture and Modern Life (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1937), p. 331.

^Sergeant, p. 138.

SThe Living City, p. 231.

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 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

II

The earliest versions of the Broadacre City

"county architect," an officer wielding extrao
redistribute land and to regulate its use. "Th
in all matters of land allotment or improvem
affecting the harmony of the whole, is the
subsequently effaced this commissar-like figur
of his city, saying more blandly that "Archit
sarily, again become the natural backbone
broad essential leaders) of such cultural end
less, Wright's critics have focussed much atte
architect, one calling him a "Philosopher-K
Seat" and questioning how his authority could
the freedom of the Usonian citizen, another c
mixture of radical equalitarianism and au
comparable figures of John Humphrey No
Robert Owen at New Lanark.11

When one asks political questions about this architectural

vision, it is natural to conclude that the county architect must
be the local agent of a political force powerful enough to uproot
railroads, relocate industries, annul corporate landholding, and
redistribute populations, all to provide greater personal liberty
for its citizens. In Broadacres, it might seem, one is compelled
to be free. Yet such questions appear to miss Wright's point,
for his books do not even address them. This suggests that his
city is Utopian not in the political sense invented by Engels to
dismiss Wright's nineteenth-century precedessors, but in an
imaginative sense linking him with the tradition of Plato and
Thomas More. It is not Wright's model, but Wright's words,
that specify the utopianism of Broadacres. The "plan" he called
for is not a political program, but a regeneration of the human
spirit.
9"Broadacre City: A New Community Plan," The Architectural Record, 246-247.

10The Living City, p. 215.

HFishman, p. 143; Norris Kelly Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Study in Architectural
Ccmtent (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1966), p. 152.

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 THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

One of Wright's critics has said, "Frank Lloyd

probably not have been happy in Broadacre Cit
Plato in his Republic, nor More in Utopia, if w
as literal proposals the political institutions and
describe. Discussing the implicit tyranny that per
the classical utopias but also more recent work
Backward and Waiden Two, Northrop Frye war
should not be read simply as a description of a mo
even if the author believes it to be one. Uto
imaginative, with its roots in literature, and th
ination is less concerned with achieving ends th
ing possibilities. . . . [The Utopian writer] is co
vision to his readers, not sharing a power or fant
them."13

The key to that vision is to be found not in the word "decen

tralize," the process which architectural plans and models can
represent, but in the term which Wright always twinned with
it, "reintegrate," an ideal which the model can only indirectly
symbolize, and only to those who know the values that Wright
attributes to the city in his essays. Reintegration is not merely a
physical matter of uniting workplace with residence or field
with factory. Rather it is a vision of spiritual integrity, of moral
and psychological harmony, set against the fragmentation of
technopolitan consciousness. To convey this ideal, Wright
turns to the utopia, a dialectical mode in which ethical alterna
tives can be clearly distinguished and made to comment on each
other. In Utopian writing, the here and now is limned in gray or
black, while the there and then shines forth in rose and gold.
More's Utopia begins with a vivid account of the evils and in
justices of Tudor England; and then we hear Hythloday's tale
of an island that lies opposite to England both geographically
and morally. The space- and time-travellers of nineteenth
century Utopian romances are always harking back upon the
evils of the place they left behind. So Wright's books on his ideal
city devote their first third to a prophetic denunciation of the
evils of present society. Conditions of modern work and dwell
«Grabow, p. 119.

«"Varieties of Literary Utopias," Daedalus, 94.2 (Spring 1965), 329-330.

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 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

ing have alienated man from his work and ha

promise of American Democracy: he attacks "r
money, on ideas in the form of patents); he de
for its demoralizing crowd, its acceleration of
consumption, and its substitution of false, "vic
for true satisfactions; he condemns mechanization under condi
tions which dehumanize the worker while multiplying benefits
for the rentier. These themes bespeak Wright's acknowledged
affiliation with Morris, Bellamy, Thorstein Vehlen and Henry
George, reflecting the nineteenth-century view of the city as a
dark satanic mill, a paleotechnic engine which reduced its hu
man attendants to grotesque fragments — "hands," or feet or
eyes — and eventually consumed them. "City" meant the atro
phy of all human qualities not useful in economic survival, in
cluding those senses of freedom, moral integrity, and esthetic
consciousness which Wright held most dear. He propounds
Broadacres as More did Utopia, as a standard against which to
measure the wickedness of his place and time. It is a counter-city,
the symbol of reintegration.

Unlike Bellamy and Butler, the Fourierists and the Shakers,

Wright does not propose to reintegrate man by reformulating
institutions. On that point his utopia tends toward an arcadian
anarchy. The integrity of Broadacres is the integrity of its single
citizens (and of the family, in Wright's view the only natural
institution). Nevertheless, Wright's utopia is not completely
atomistic: the individual does find his place in larger social
forms. As Frye has observed, many ideal commonwealths depend
on an assumed analogy between the individual and the social
order.14 The proper way to read this analogy is "inward," under
standing the Utopian society as a macrocosmic symbol of the
single human being — as in the Republic, where Socrates under
takes his depiction of a commonwealth specifically so that the
qualities of the just man may be more easily comprehended be
cause "written large" in the hierarchies and operations of the
14pp. 331-332. In Plato's view, he writes, "the disciplined individual is the only free
individual. ... He is free because a powerful will is ready to spring into action to help
reason do whatever it sees fit. . . . [But] it is true that what frees the individual seems
to enslave society, and that something goes all wrong with human freedom when we
take an analogy between individual and social order literally."

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 THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

city. In the Timaeus Plato expounds his theor

a series of nested, corresponding spheres, w
earth within heavens, man within earth, so
state with man appears not fanciful but nece
neoplatonic world too, the integrated human
within its two isomorphs, the Usonian hous
state. It is in this correspondential sense that t
sensitively designed to complement the fami
seen as the "exemplar" of the Usonian state
city is the figure of both organic man and n
might seem political compulsion directed th
architect, or a behaviorist faith in architec
termine attitude and conduct, can be better un
analogy is read "inward" — as the spiritual
one's house in order. In The Living City Wrig
[Man's] own nature may be so attuned to the nature of
himself would be a new, more vital, kind of success. O
terior organic process is he (or are we) going to be abl
democracy.15

Ill

The specific form of Wright's neoplatonism is that of the Ame

ican transcendentalists, who are so often cited in his prose
influences or sources of mottos and epigraphs. When Democrac
Builds begins by quoting Whitman's "Song of the Universa
The Living City ends with an excerpt from Emerson's "Far
ing," which calls the countryman the noblest and most creat
of men. And it has become a commonplace to observe t
Wright's architectural style, that "sense of space in spaciousnes
was anticipated by Thoreau's description of his ideal house
I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a gold
age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work, which shall s
consist of only one room. ... A house whose inside is as open and manifes
as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the ba
without seeing some of its inhabitants: where to be a guest is to be presen
with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from sev
eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at hom
there, — in solitary confinement.16
15p. 244.

WWalden, ed. Sherman Paul (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1960), pp. 166-167
("House-Warming").

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 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

However, it should be understood that Thoreau too inhabited

a concentrically linked symbolic world, and that earlier in his
book he had written of the house as the image of the soul:
It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately than I did, con
sidering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window, a cellar, a garret,
have in the nature of man. . . . What of architectural beauty I now see, I
know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and
character of the indweller, who is the only builder, — out of some unconscious
truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance.17

In the organic cosmology of Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau and

Wright, the world and the soul correspond point for point;
whatever intermediary structures man creates — poem or house
or state — should tally with that natural correspondence. To
affirm this linking of inner and outer worlds, Wright's essays
repeatedly conjoin Lao-tze ("The reality of the building does
not consist in the four walls and roof but in the space within to
be lived in") with Jesus Christ ("The Kingdom of God is with
in you"). The kingdom within is to be spacious, harmonious,
organically unified; the space of the house, and the style of the
city, are larger images of that inner kingdom. In that spiritual
house there are no impervious partitions, no walling-in or wall
ing-out; in that city there is no overdevelopment of one area
at the expense of others, no preference of one function over
another. In that kingdom all the powers of the whole are avail
able to each of its parts. Wright's epithet for Broadacres — "the
city that is nowhere or everywhere" — can be seen to refer not
only to a process of decentralization, but also to the spiritual in
clusiveness — nowhere yet everywhere — which is at the heart
of his city metaphor.18

Now Wright's "county architect" can be understood as the

presiding genius of that inner kingdom, the equivalent of Whit
17pp. 31-32 ("Economy").

ISA similarly correspondential world is propounded in the poetry of William Blake,

whose name appears twice on the signboards accompanying the Broadacres model, once
as "required reading" for those who would understand his city, once among those social
and economic reformers — Tolstoi, Kropotkin, Gesell — whom Broadacres "commem
orates." Though it is hard to imagine Wright reading patiently through Jerusalem or
Milton, he might have found there a vision of correspondences, an urgency of rhetoric,
and a sense of psycho-political mission similar to those offered by the more accessible
(and quotable) Americans.

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 THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

man's prototypical "Self," Thoreau's or Em

sometimes called this figure the artifex, the
toil or by concentration of superior ability
tion, physical, aesthetic, intellectual or mor
received' to human life."19 Elsewhere he cal
speak of genius as though it were the extrus
or other. No, the quality is not there. Find
find a poet."20 In the divided state of man, t
ist, a professional — an architect, a write
Usonia, the artifex is a power common to a
freely exercised by all. This poetic power,
Autobiography, is the capacity to discover
in the expression of actual construction."2
sonian hero, that universal man who discerns the form latent
in the heart of nature, and utters it as a creation with an archi
tecture of its own. Civilization owes its existence to the artifex,
for it is he who has created its true capital wealth — not tangible
goods, but those usable patterns which the imagination half dis
covers in nature, and half creates: epics and symphonies, the
principles of aerodynamics and the design of the transistor, the
logarithmic spiral and the spiral of the Guggenheim Museum.
In his dystopian description of the old centralized megalopolis,
Wright portrays the artifex as the victim of a materialist eco
nomic system which rewards not the creation of forms but only
the production of commodities derived from those forms. —
While in Broadacres, the artifex is the ordinary citizen, or, as
Wright would have put it, the extraordinary citizen.
"Man lives in a fragmented world," said Berdyaev, "and
dreams of a world reintegrated. The hallmark of utopia is whole
ness. Utopia is destined to surmount fragmentation and restore
wholeness."22 If fragmentation is a perennial motive for Utopian
l'JThe Disappearing City, p. 10.
20"Foreword Concluded," Architectural Forum, 68.1 (January 1938), 101. Then he
quotes Whitman's description of the poet as the "equable man," from the 1855 Preface
to Leaves of Grass. See also A Testament (New York: Horizon Press, 1957), p. 192: "We
must recognize the creative architect as poet and interpreter of life."
21 An Autobiography (New York: Horizon Press, 1977), pp. 371-372.
22Nicolas Berdyaev, Royanme de l'Esprit et Royaume de César, trans. Philippe Sabant
(Neuchátel: Delachaux 8c Niestlé, 1951), p. 166; cited in Robert C. Elliott, The Shape
of Utopia (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 90.

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 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

imagining, it was an evil historically acute

Wright. Industrial civilization, based on sp
tion and division of process, had shaped the c
image. In its clutch, human personality dis
the factory, Emerson wrote, is reduced to a
becomes a machine himself. "Out of the Ma
has become," says Wright, "no citizen can crea
machinery. . . . He has traded the Book of C
lation by way of the Substitute."23 The hero
propose is Man undivided, Man redeemed fr
Emerson never gave full treatment to a Ut
of his reintegrated man,24 but Wright spent
sketching, modeling, and describing Broad
macrocosm of that integrated, unspecialized
Emerson, believed we all might become. In
zen is at once farmer, factory worker, builder
of arts and education. Broadacres is where man and machine
strike a balance, machinery used not to accelerate production
or to enslave and disintegrate man, but to lighten and simplify
work and to enhance the craftsman-like use of materials, Broad
acres is where work and leisure are so re-defined as not to seem
antithetical, since in Wright's Gesellian economy it is consump
tion, not production, that dictates the conditions of labor, and
in his Ruskinian culture the public demand is not for quantity
but for quality. Broadacres is where the farmstead nurtures the
integrity of the family, man's natural social setting; where the
self-reliant citizen is accommodated within ah undemanding
democratic society. Where not only the physical but also the
cultural distinctions between city and country are effaced,
Broadacres providing both the country's intimacy with nature
and — thanks partly to telecommunications, partly to regional
decentralization — the city's opportunities for entertainment,
education and service. Broadacres is man in full possession of
all his faculties.

23When Democracy Builds, p. 1.

24Michael Cowan has traced the outlines of Emerson's Utopia in City of the West:
Emerson, America, and Urban Metaphor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).
The first part of chapter 5, "The Organic City," seems closely to describe Broadacres.

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 THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

If you can see the varied, multiple parts all thus contri
matic whole in which you sense the repose of individua
and the exuberance of plenty — the life of the imagin
in the over-all view from wherever you may happen to
get a glimpse of the country-loving life in agronomy
city.25

Northrop Frye distinguishes the utopia proper, with its em

phasis on hierarchy, industry, and urbanized man's ascendancy
over nature, from the arcadia, which stresses simplicity and
equality, leisure and art, and the integration of man with na
ture.26 One further integrative function of Wright's symbolic
city is to overcome even this disjunction, providing a mechan
ized arcadia, where the Cougar lies down with the lamb.
In a utopia that unites man and machine, art and labor, na
ture and society, the representative citizen is indeed the archi
tect. As Robert Fishman has pointed out, the architect is both
artist and engineer:27 he works with the stuff of dreams and with
the tolerances of steel and plywood. He reconciles his personal
vision with social purposes.28 Discerning the patterns integral in
his materials and in the site, he fabricates a space that is natural
to man, an interior space both physical and metaphysical. "This
new sense of Architecture as integral-pattern . . . may awaken
the United States to fresh beauty," Wright declared in his Auto
biography; "Integral-pattern becomes 'the sound of the Usonian
heart.' "29 This architect plans not for a county, but for a state
of mind. He might indeed be called the Philosopher King, who
in Plato's allegory symbolizes the human power to comprehend
Form and to translate it into personal spiritual harmony. This
is the architecture, says Wright, of man's soul.30

25The Living City, p. 98.

2«pp. 338-339.

27pp. 106-109.

28Norris Kelly Smith, pp. 58-59, questions how successful Wright was in doing so.

2»p. 374.

30The Living City, p. 240.

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 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

IV

When Utopian planners turn to actual physical design, their

instinct has been to produce radiocentric, symmetrical cities:
Plato's semi-utopian Atlantis, More's Amaurote, Campanella's
City of the Sun, Considerant's Phalanx, Ebenezer Howard's Gar
den City. It is easy to postulate, in their resemblance to the
Jungian mandala, some link between the Utopian imagination
and a search for symbols of personal integrity. Wright's model
of course eschews such centripetal physical designs. Nevertheless,
some details of the model do use physical form to express spir
itual aspirations. Of course there are the linear highway and the
broad regional field, which were to Wright the "integral-pat
tern" of freedom. A "Temple of Universal Worship," three con
centric hexagons encompassing a circle, reflects Wright's belief
that "religion is necessary to good life and work," serving "the
depths and the breadths of the universal soul," to restore "com
plete human harmony."31 And the one-acre allotments are so
platted that each takes the form of the Golden Section, that
ancient Pythagorean symbol of personal and cosmic harmony.32
The true center of Broadacre City, once again, is the Kingdom
Within.

Broadacres may have no center save in each citizen's heart and

hearth; but a delimited model representing four square miles
must have a physical center also. The model was built in four
sections, each six feet square. What did Wright place at the
intersection of these quadrants, as the focus of his display? If
automotive decentralization were the paramount theme of
Broadacre City, the linear highway would pass through the
model's center, to dramatize its role as connector, axis of design,
and symbol of liberation. But rather it is set at the extreme edge;
'■¡i When Democracy Builds, p. 107.

32F,ach acre, according to Wright's annotations of the model, measures 165 x 264 feet:
see "Broadacre City: A New Community Plan," The Architectural Record, 251. "Pyth
agoras" is the first of the spiritual influences which Wright acknowledges in a postscript
to his autobiography (p. 617), though it seems to have been the philosopher's disciples
who attributed spiritual significance to the .618 ratio. Wright's Autobiography every
where displays a Pythagorean faith in cosmic harmony: "The pattern of reality is super
geometrical, casting a spell or a charm over any geometry" (p. 181).

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 THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

and at the model's heart stand the three main schools of this
district. Education is an essential theme in Wright's books on
his city, as it is in most Utopian writing. Condemning present
schools and universities as too big and too specialized, he pro
poses small, unspecialized, practical schools, and "design cen
ters" where apprentices study with a master. The revolution
that will bring about Broadacres, he writes, is not a violent
political stroke but "earnest educational revolution."33 An edu
cation in natural patterning, in the meaning of work, in the
esthetic use of industrial techniques: an education in the archi
tecture of man's world.

Education not only goes on in Broadacres; it goes on through

Broadacres, through Wright's description of his city. Northrop
Frye has observed that "the literary convention of an ideal state
is really a by-product of a systematic view of education."34 In
Plato's Republic, the ideal city is introduced frankly as a heur
istic device; Campanella's City of the Sun and Skinner's Waiden
II are preoccupied with the instruction of the young. (And how
many Utopian communities, their millennial fever spent, have
like Owen's New Harmony settled at last for some reform in
education!) Broadacre City was conceived about the time when
Wright founded his own educational enterprise, the Taliesin
Fellowship. The model was built by his apprentices, and was
for a time a prescribed part of their course of study. Today it is
displayed on the wall of a studio adjacent to the drafting room
at Taliesin North in Wisconsin. Wright once said that with
some money for food and materials, he and the Fellowship
"might have started Broadacre City right then and there, our
selves."35

Like the pylon that stands in its civic center as "Beacon to the
Lost Tribes of a Continent," Broadacres was articulated by
Wright to counterpoint his diatribe against the evils of a dys
topian over-urbanized society, to symbolize his faith in the har
monious development of all of an individual's human faculties,
33When Democracy Builds, p. 44; The Liinng City, p. 85. See Fishman, pp. 136-138,
for an interpretive summary.

34pp. 335-336.

35Autobiography, p. 439.

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 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

and to actualize his vision of moral integrity,

the world." Like any teacher, he redeems his
case fields, factories, shops, roads and dwellin
dom disorder of experience, and ranges th
ble, unified structure. He asks, Socratically
city has in the nature of man.. When Judit
the significance of More's utopia, she desc
as well:

Utopia was a model, ari ideal pattern that invited contemplation and judg
ment but did not entail any other activity. It is a perfection that the mind's
eye recognizes as true and which is described as such, and so serves as a
standard of moral judgment. ... As such it is an expression of the craftsman's
desire for perfection and permanence. That is why utopia, the moralist's
artifact, is of necessity a changeless harmonious whole, in which a shared
recognition of truth unites all the citizens.38

Shklar's last two sentences here suggest another characteristic

of Utopian imagining that Broadacres may embody. Utopias oc
cur in clusters, one germinating another, as Looking Backward
did News from Nowhere and a score of ephemeral responses.
Epochs of acute political discord, like the Renaissance and the
later nineteenth century, may generate utopias not only to focuá
political debate but to symbolize a lost and much-desired social
stability. The 1930's, when Wright designed Broadacres, was
likewise rife with utopias and model cities, each offering at once
a solution to, and an escape from, the confusions of that era. Le
Corbusier's are perhaps the most memorable, tracing between
two wars his search for a principle of social authority. Further,
utopias as macrocosmic symbols of perfection and permanence
often seem to spring from times of dissolution in the lives of
their creators. Looking Backward unites its reforming zeal with
a valetudinarian's desire to rise from his bed transformed by a
long mesmeric sleep. News from Nowhere, written six years be
fore Morris's death and five months before the final collapse of
his health, presents a hero who longs to regain his youth in that
36"The Political Theory of Utopia: From Melancholy to Nostalgia," Daedalus, 94.2
(Spring, 1965), 371. See also Robert C. Twombly, Frank Lloyd Wright: An Interpretive
Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1973): "Broadacres City was a platform for crit
icism and a standard against which to measure prevailing conditions" (p. 183). And
Norris Kelly Smith: "Broadacre City . . . should not be looked upon as a practicable
plan for social action but as a declaration of ultimate principle" (p. 165).

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 THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

childlike land where years are not a burd

become for its creator the symbol of an es
deliverance from time.37

With its avowed correspondence between the nation and the

single soul, Broadacre City had an evident personal significance
for Wright. Conceived literally in the desert, at the end of a
decade and a half of great personal turmoil and professional
neglect, Broadacres symbolized both a still-tentative grasp at
personal reintegration and a bid for recognition as not merely
a domestic architect but a planner who could engineer for all
America, a nation gripped by a depression he attributed to forces
inherent in the industrial megalopolis. Undertaken when he was
past sixty, Broadacres became the lodestar of Wright's long old
age, his image of life's culmination, a millennial city. "In the
organic city," he wrote, "we might live indefinitely! . . . Both
buildings and city should be more truly [a] defense against
time."38 And so they are, for Wright's housing plans imply a
timeless, static relationship of citizen, house and land. First,
acreage allotments are not the disposable property of those who
dwell there. They are inalienable and indivisible (though evi
dently they can be reassigned by the county architect). They
seem not subject to the temporal rhythms of inhabitation — to
changes in employment or family size, or in capacity for work;
to wanderlust, or migration, or the desire to cluster near water,
friends or scenery. Also, each house is built by its residents, to
reflect their particular needs and temperaments. Such a dwell
ing might grow, but it is not foreseen that it should later shrink,
or that others might someday live there who had no share in
planning or building it. To account for this inflexibility, one
might invoke Wright's frequently authoritarian relationship
with his personal clients, or reflect on whether the absolute own
ership of land has proven an unmixed blessing to America; but
also one might recognize that Broadacres was for Wright a sym
bol of completion and immortality, a city where time would
be no more.

3"In financial ruin and artistic obscurity, Le Corbusier designed his Contemporary
City; Louis Napoleon solaced himself in exile with plans for a new Paris; even Adolf
Hitler in prison in 1924 planned a grandiose center for Berlin.
38The Living City, pp. 82, 111; Wright italicized the first four words of this quotation.

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 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

Broadacres also stood as a symbol of fulfi

the architect's other books. In 1932 he com
sion of his autobiography, a casting-back o
organized its narrative around a series of imag
integration, some of them persons (his mothe
Olgivanna and his second family) and some
Wisconsin valley of his boyhood, Chicago,
last section, "Freedom," a distillation of six
is an indictment of urban and industrial sla
the counter-image of Broadacre City. In the s
published the first account of that city, Th
In 1943 he extended the memoir with a ch
from the preceding decade, and publishe
"book" of the autobiography, titled Broada
scription of his city at all, but a political a
for which the city evidently stood as a symbo
dom, like the Celestial City at the end of The
In 1945 he incorporated Broadacre City into
the Autobiography, and published When De
amplification of The Disappearing City and
of his essays on Broadacres. In 1958, as his
issued The Living City, a work enhanced b
many plans, sketches and photographs of the
Usonian dwellings, though at the same tim
for-line revision of the text in which Wrig
say everything in one last book, overloaded or
members of every sentence without regard
portance of their content. In those same y
came for him the very landscape of his mind,
or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha.39 The 1935 m
some of his then-unrealized plans for both
story apartments and for a luxurious private
for the 1958 book incorporated into Broada
his projects, both realized and unrealized, fr
Tahoe to the Price Tower in Bartlesville, to a "Steel Cathedral"
for Manhattan. The style of the sketching became futurist, al
39Twombly, p. 305, suggests this analogy. He and Smith, p. 153, both catalog the
buildings which Wright incorporated into Broadacre City.

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 THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

most surreal. "The drawings," his biograp

has said, "represent Wright's last attemp
mate depiction of America as he woul
Wright had given his life the archetypal im
a paradisal valley, through the cities of t
the desert, to a celestial city, harmonious a
had seemed lost would be gathered togeth

"This commonwealth we have been foun

discourse," says Glaucon near the end of
think it nowhere exists on earth." No, re
not; "but perhaps there is a pattern set
one who desires to see it and, seeing it,
self."41 Broadacre City, Wright insisted,
and nowhere. In the late 1920's he apprai
machine on the city's fabric — the auto, th
electrification. He saw that the energy o
exhausted, that soon it would collapse in
disappear. Today we can see the lineaments
every city, beginning just where the old ci
Decentralization is indeed everywhere. Re
is not everywhere. It is, as the word uto
nowhere. But, as Plato told Glaucon, thi
does not exist. It exists in a twelve-foot-s
studio in Wisconsin. It exists in the forty
of Wright's Usonian buildings — for we
in his concentric imagination the house is t
city, exhibiting the city's qualities on
comprehend. Primarily, though, it exists
as an articulated vision of truth and inte
sometimes false and always chaotic world o
ence. Broadacres is the communal form t
mediate between the patterns of Nature
of the Soul.

40p. 305.

41 The Republic, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (1945; rpt., New York: Oxford
University Press, 1969), pp. 319-320 (ix. 592).

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