Frank Lloyd Wright: Broadacre City Project

The latest volume in MoMA’s One on One series: a deep dive into the architectural giant’s arcadian vision of the modern habitat

When American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) proposed Broadacre City (1929–35), he advanced an astonishing claim: that the metropolis was obsolete. In its place, Broadacre was to be a “Usonian” synthesis, an unprecedented landscape unsullied by convention or history, consisting simply of “architecture and acreage.” With its low-density carpet of small plots, predominantly one- and two-story buildings, and seemingly infinite territory, the ruralized landscape of Broadacre would sustain new levels of individuality and freedom, far more democratic than a traditional metropolis could ever support.
This slim paperback reader, the latest volume in MoMA’s One on One series, is penned by Juliet Kinchin, a former curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She guides the reader through Wright’s conception of Broadacre and its theoretical underpinnings and implications. Reproductions of Wright’s preparatory sketches and photographs of his model city are interspersed throughout Kinchin’s account.