index

General description of Broadacre City

click on images for full-size:

The introductory image from Prof. Manfed Sinz's discussion of Broadacre City in his lecture on contemporary space issues, used with his permission

Wright sketched several pictures of Broadacre City, and with his students built a large model. Some views can be found on the web through Google's image search.

The broad acre city, where every family will have at least an acre of land, is the inevitable municipality of the future . . . We live now in cities of the past, slaves of the machine and of traditional building. We cannot solve our living and transportation problems by burrowing under or climbing over, and why should we? We will spread out, and in so doing will transform our human habitation sites into those allowing beauty of design and landscaping, sanitation and fresh air, privacy and playgrounds, and a plot whereon to raise things. Wright 1932, 1-2
Nature here again becomes a continuous environment, in which all the urban functions are dispersed and isolated under the form of limited units. Housing is individual: not apartments, but private houses with at least four acres of property each, land which the proprietor uses for agriculture and for different leisure activities. Work is sometimes attached to housing (studios, laboratories, and individual offices), sometimes incorporated in little specialized centers: industrial or commercial units are each time reduced to the minimum viable size, destined for a minimum number of persons. The same is true of hospitals and cultural establishements, the large number of which compensate for their dispersion and their generally reduced scale. All these cells (individual and social) are linked and related to each other by an abundant network of land and air routes: isolation has meaning only if it can be broken at any moment. (29)