Frank Lloyd Wright: Broadacre City Project dissects one of the twentieth century's most audacious urban proposals — Wright's declaration that the metropolis itself was obsolete, and his vision of a ruralized American landscape built on individuality over density.
About This Book
Published as part of MoMA's One on One series, this compact volume examines Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City project (1929–35) with the focused attention the work demands. Wright's proposal was not merely an urban planning exercise but a philosophical provocation: that the traditional city was antithetical to democratic life. In its place, he envisioned a 'Usonian' landscape — low-density, decentralised, and free from historical convention — where architecture and land would exist in a new synthesis. The model covered four square miles yet housed only 1,400 families, creating a spatial category that defies easy classification. Juliet Kinchin unpacks the ideological ambitions and formal contradictions embedded in this singular project.
Key Features
- 48 pages examining Wright's Broadacre City model and its theoretical underpinnings
- Author: Juliet Kinchin
- Focus on Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City Project (1929–35) as a case study
- Published by The Museum of Modern Art
What You'll Discover
- Why Wright believed the modern metropolis was incompatible with democratic ideals, and what he proposed in its place
- The concept of 'Usonian' architecture as a distinctly American spatial and social vision, unencumbered by European urban traditions
- How the Broadacre model occupies an ambiguous category — neither urban, rural, nor suburban — and what that hybridity reveals about mid-century American ideology
- The tension between Wright's rhetoric of individual freedom and the prescriptive, totalising nature of Broadacre's planned landscape
About the Author
Juliet Kinchin is a curator and scholar associated with The Museum of Modern Art. Her work engages with the history of design and architecture as expressions of broader social and ideological conditions.
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 48
- Dimensions: 18.42 x 0.51 x 22.86 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781633451537
- Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects and urban designers interested in utopian planning history, students of American modernism, and anyone examining the relationship between spatial form and democratic ideology.