Broadacre City
Broadacre City is an urban concept developed by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright . Wright presented his idea in the article The Disappearing City , published in 1932, and in 1935 in the form of a model that formulated a section of about 10 square kilometers of his vision architecturally and in terms of town planning. The model was created by students in his Taliesin studio.
Conception
Wright's vision for American development is an antithesis to the concept of the city and, in particular , an antithesis to the visions of the representatives of the architectural avant-garde, who, as in Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin , imagine the city of the future as a compact, rationalized machine. Wright, on the other hand, proposes a suburban , decentralized landscape in which the residents should live self-sufficient and highly mobile. The Broadacre City represents both a planning statement and a utopian model of society in which every US family would be allocated one acre (approx. 4000 m²) of land. The "rebirth" of the country in the form of an agricultural landscape free of agglomerations, inhabited by self-determined people who cultivate their own land, should, according to Wright, develop a new community that relies on family, spirituality and knowledge.
Individual transport in the form of automobiles is preferred in Wright's utopia as an autonomous means of transportation. Pedestrians can only move safely within their acres . A highly developed information and communication technology is intended to provide the residents of Broadacre City with all the information they need at all times. " Wherever the citizen goes (and even while he goes) he has information, shelter and entertainment at his disposal. What he needs, what he has or wants to know, is always easily accessible for him " (Frank Lloyd Wright 1935).
Wright kept coming up with the concept of Broadacre City in books and articles until his death in 1959.
In retrospect, "Broadacre City" seems to map out the state of today's American city, so the so-called Edge City looks like an unplanned, incomplete version of Broadacre City.
literature
- Frank Lloyd Wright: The Disappearing City . New York, WF Payson, 1932.
- Frank Lloyd Wright: When Democracy Builds . University of Chicago Press, 1945.
- Frank Lloyd Wright: The Living City . New York, Horizon Press, 1958.
- Peter Zellner: THE LARGE CITY IS NO LONGER MODERN. Broadacre City by Frank Lloyd Wright . In Daidalos 69/70, Berlin 1998.