The Living City

Innovative architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) developed a concept of architecture as "organic," where preexisting styles (e.g., Neoclassic, Victorian) were rejected in favor of designing buildings which seemed to fit in with and arise from their natural surroundings; he even tried to use locally-occurring materials in their construction. (See his book, The Natural House.) His grand plan (first presented in his 1932 book THE DISAPPEARING CITY, which was revised in 1958 as this book) was called "Broadacre City," a low-density, decentralized and dispersed urban community (heavily reliant upon modern communications, the automobile, and superhighways) that would "merge" town and country, rural and urban, set in an ideal democracy (with socialist facets) he called Usonia. This book is hardly a dry, architectural treatise; much of it contains Wright's own personal philosophy for design, such as: "Exaggerated perpindicularity ... is now the terrible stricture of our big city. Whatever is perpindicular casts a shadow: shadows of the skyscraper fall aground and where crowded are an utterly selfish exploitation." "Of all the underlying forces working toward emancipation of the city dweller, most important is the gradual reawakening of the primitive instincts of the agrarian." "Architecture is organic only because intrinsic." "Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men." He responds to a charge that he once "dreaded the machine" by saying, "I then dreaded the machine unless well in the hand of the creative artist." If you want details about his design for Broadacre City, you'll need books such as Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century; but this is a very interesting book with the ideas of one of the most important 20th century architects.

This book is a direct descendant of FLlW's "The Disappearing City, written in 1932. It's worth reading for many reasons, not least of which is the author's advocacy of 1-acre-per-person in his ideal Broadacre City, for self-sufficiency via mini-farming, a principle which directly conflicts with the contemporary anti-sprawl advocacy demanding that houses (preferably rowhouses) be placed compactly on tiny lots, clearly too small for resident food-production.