index
Critics as totalitarians
click on images for full-size:
Houses at Middleton Hills, which claims inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright for its house forms, though its layout follows New Urbanist patterns rather than Wright's.
Critics of Wright's proposals worried that the atomization caused by the individual homesteads would create a populace that would be easy prey to new totalitarianisms such as those arising in Europe at that time. Some decentralizing movements today, and the growing influence of the media, can give credence to such fears, but on the other hand, city crowds have been fertile breeding grounds for totalitarian regimes. In a further twist to this issue, Stephen Grabow points out that:
The resistance of many of Wright's critics to the new postindustrial patterns of urbanization and suburbanization is unsupportable precisely because it places them squarely in the utopian and authoritarian posture of which he was accused. Grabow 1977, 122