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 exhibit at MOMA is a single room. Entering it, you are confronted by a model and drawings, from 1913, for the San Francisco Call Building, which wouldn’t have been out of place in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” The drawings use heightened perspective and exaggerated angles, and they make the building look futuristic and imposing, even today. The show also features the plans, including an eight-foot model, for Wright’s famous mile-high skyscraper, known as the Illinois, which would have been five hundred and forty-eight stories high and would have housed a hundred thousand people.
The center of the exhibition is taken up by a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot model of “Broadacre City,” which was Wright’s plan for the perfect community. Each family would get an acre of land. Residential areas would be spaced out between areas for commerce, industry, parkland, and agriculture. Everything would be connected by a complex design of streets and highways. “Imagine spacious landscaped highways,” Wright wrote. “Giant roads, themselves great architecture, pass public service stations, no longer eyesores, expanded to include all kinds of service and comfort.” Broadacre City is so broad, so horizontal, that it barely makes sense to call it a city anymore.
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,” near Spring Green, 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.
It is often noted that Wright brought “organic” ideas to architecture and urban planning. But what do we mean by this? Wright’s buildings have hard lines and rigid geometrical shapes. They don’t look like trees. They aren’t organic in the way of growing things. Instead, his buildings are constructed so that they “fit in” with their environment, with trees, forests, rivers, and streams. His homes—like the famous Fallingwater, in Western Pennsylvania—fit into the space of nature, and the space of nature, likewise, seems to fit in with them.
As it turned out, no American city ever adopted the rules that Wright concocted, nor did the suburbs (they turned spread into sprawl). The Call Building, the Illinois, Broadacre City—none was ever built. Wright could never let go of his inborn sense of “proper spacing.” When this idée fixe worked, it really worked, as with Fallingwater. But cities and nature grow differently than Wright hoped they would. There are swamps in nature. There are deserts so sparsely vegetated that they create spread beyond anything Wright imagined for his communities. Cities have their own spacing, their own inner laws, and those laws don’t seem to mesh with the laws of the Valley. The adjective “organic” can refer to gentle hills and dales, or to the crazed space inside an ant’s nest.
Wright was often annoyed that the wondrous laws of the Valley were resisted by the outside world, the real world. Perhaps he was right to be annoyed. There is something maddening and melancholy about how true beauty is so un-extendable. Beauty doesn’t go where we want it to go, leaving so much of our world mired in ugliness—what Wright called “the drab.”
But this, too, is a fact about the world. Modern cities are hives and tangles and piles. Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t have these sorts of metaphors in his repertoire. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, perhaps the dominant feeling is that there isn’t a way out of the city, either vertically or horizontally. Like it or not, the city can no longer be escaped. To live in the city, then, you have to go further inside. That’s a directional metaphor Wright never explored: inward. Perhaps the space and the freedom to be found within cities is within the tangle, in the nooks and crannies, within the density of the hive. Inside the cramped space of the city, one is forced to confront oneself, to figure out who to be and how to be it, from the inside out.
Photograph: Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
