Frank Lloyd Wright hated cities. He thought that they were cramped and crowded, stupidly designed, or, more often, built without any sense of design at all. He once wrote, “To look at the plan of a great City is to look at something like the cross-section of a fibrous tumor.” Wright was always looking for a way to cure the cancer of the city. For him, the central problem was that cities lacked essential elements like space, air, light, and silence. Looking at the congestion and overcrowding of New York City, he lamented, “The whole city is in agony.”
A show currently at the Museum of Modern Art—“Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal”—documents Wright’s attempts to fix the problem of the city. As it turns out, Wright wavered on the matter. Sometimes he favored urban density. Other times he dreamed a suburban or rural fantasy. (...)
The subtitle of the MOMA show—“Density vs. Dispersal”—suggests a dilemma, a choice. Yet the more you look at Wright’s plans—mile-high skyscrapers on the one hand, meticulously designed, spread-out, semi-rural communities on the other—the more you realize that Wright wasn’t conflicted about density versus dispersal at all. These were just two versions of the same impulse to escape. Wright was a man saying, “Get me the hell out of here.” Sometimes he wanted to go up. Sometimes he wanted to go out. If he pushed hard enough, upward or outward, Wright thought that he could find enough space for us to fix the dehumanizing problems of the city.
Wright spent his early childhood in a place he called “the Valley,” in Ixonia, Wisconsin. The Valley, Wright wrote in his 1932 autobiography, was “lovable,” “lying fertile between two ranges of diversified soft hills, with a third ridge intruding and dividing it in two smaller valleys at the upper end.” There were natural lines of demarcation between different kinds of terrain. Areas of bare land were set apart from concentrations of vegetable growth. Little houses were tucked in groves of trees here and there, along lanes “worm-fenced with oak-rails split in the hillside forests.” A root house was “partially dug into the ground and roofed with a sloping mound of grass-covered earth.” In short, there was room for each thing to be just what it needed to be.
The Valley made such an impression on Wright’s sensibilities that he created a code that would make modern cities more like the Valley. He wrote plans and rulebooks for how skyscrapers should be built and cities designed, trying to find the right amount of space between structures and over all. For Wright, implicit rules for “proper spacing” were simply true and universal. They were cosmic rules, written into the land from time immemorial. As an architect and urban planner, Wright’s job was simply to translate these rules into plans for the building of structures and cities.
In this way, Broadacre City makes a very specific kind of sense. Horizontal “spread” would leave room for parks, for personal space, for residential areas, for open vistas, and for light and air. Wright’s vertical ambitions are a little harder to understand. How would towering skyscrapers holding a hundred thousand people create a sense of freedom and space? The answer is in the context. The mile-high Illinois is not a building that stands alone. It makes space in the city. It allows for the other buildings to find their own height, even to be small. That’s the wonder of Wright’s city concepts. He envisioned his incredible urban structures as vertical “spreaders,” just as he envisioned his planned communities like Broadacre City to be horizontal spreaders, giving different aspects of a community room to exist.
A show currently at the Museum of Modern Art—“Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal”—documents Wright’s attempts to fix the problem of the city. As it turns out, Wright wavered on the matter. Sometimes he favored urban density. Other times he dreamed a suburban or rural fantasy. (...)
The subtitle of the MOMA show—“Density vs. Dispersal”—suggests a dilemma, a choice. Yet the more you look at Wright’s plans—mile-high skyscrapers on the one hand, meticulously designed, spread-out, semi-rural communities on the other—the more you realize that Wright wasn’t conflicted about density versus dispersal at all. These were just two versions of the same impulse to escape. Wright was a man saying, “Get me the hell out of here.” Sometimes he wanted to go up. Sometimes he wanted to go out. If he pushed hard enough, upward or outward, Wright thought that he could find enough space for us to fix the dehumanizing problems of the city.Wright spent his early childhood in a place he called “the Valley,” in Ixonia, Wisconsin. The Valley, Wright wrote in his 1932 autobiography, was “lovable,” “lying fertile between two ranges of diversified soft hills, with a third ridge intruding and dividing it in two smaller valleys at the upper end.” There were natural lines of demarcation between different kinds of terrain. Areas of bare land were set apart from concentrations of vegetable growth. Little houses were tucked in groves of trees here and there, along lanes “worm-fenced with oak-rails split in the hillside forests.” A root house was “partially dug into the ground and roofed with a sloping mound of grass-covered earth.” In short, there was room for each thing to be just what it needed to be.
The Valley made such an impression on Wright’s sensibilities that he created a code that would make modern cities more like the Valley. He wrote plans and rulebooks for how skyscrapers should be built and cities designed, trying to find the right amount of space between structures and over all. For Wright, implicit rules for “proper spacing” were simply true and universal. They were cosmic rules, written into the land from time immemorial. As an architect and urban planner, Wright’s job was simply to translate these rules into plans for the building of structures and cities.
In this way, Broadacre City makes a very specific kind of sense. Horizontal “spread” would leave room for parks, for personal space, for residential areas, for open vistas, and for light and air. Wright’s vertical ambitions are a little harder to understand. How would towering skyscrapers holding a hundred thousand people create a sense of freedom and space? The answer is in the context. The mile-high Illinois is not a building that stands alone. It makes space in the city. It allows for the other buildings to find their own height, even to be small. That’s the wonder of Wright’s city concepts. He envisioned his incredible urban structures as vertical “spreaders,” just as he envisioned his planned communities like Broadacre City to be horizontal spreaders, giving different aspects of a community room to exist.
by Morgan Meis, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Frank Lloyd Wright
