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| Image Source: "Frank Lloyd Wright: Broadacre City." Photo. Sense-of-creativity.blogspot.com 2 July 2011. 10 January 2012 http://sense-of-creativity.blogspot.com/2010/11/frank-lloyd-wrights-city.htm |
My suburban attitude has
been consumed with negativity this past semester. I have been around for almost twenty-two years now, and I am
just becoming aware of my surroundings.
A surrounding that serves as my neighborhood and home now seems
fraudulent, impractical, and for the most part, lazy. When I was young, I thought vinyl siding and brick were the only materials
that could be used for housing, and choosing the colors with the contractor was
a luxurious option to personalize my family’s own home. Backyards were the answer to
environmental conservation in rural neighborhoods, and Targets or Walmarts found
a block away were marked as convenient.
Building a home that can hardly withstand any sustainable test is one
thing, but avoiding a true issue such as suburban sprawl is another. This makes me question if the varieties of convenience that surround neighborhoods (grocery stores, shopping malls, gas stations, schools, etc) detract from there even being a problem to begin with.
Luckily for my suburban attitude, I visited the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit in the
Phoenix Art Museum over break. Broadacre City, designed by
Frank Lloyd Wright, was a futuristic vision for what an urban city could be. Broadacre
promised an acre of land to each residence, making it a highly decentralized
city, integrating a diversified system of markets, factories, schools, and farms all one hundred and fifty miles from one's home. Today, a suburb has turned
into more of a rejection than inclusion of a city, which was what Frank
Lloyd Wright wanted to avoid. How
would this very transition take place then if a suburb were to undergo change into a more
acceptable aspect of a city? What about the area would make it acceptable?
I understand your negative view-point on suburban developments, seeing how I share the same view. At the same time I do not feel that the Broadacre City is a great example of avoiding suburbanism completely. I get the points that it integrates all socio' classes together. The one aspect of this type of proposal is the promise of 1 acre and the tight calculations of overall regional planning. This to me seems to be suburbanism on a grand scale. Each plot equal, each person has the same distant to an retail building, all work in x amount of miles from a housing sector. This concept takes the formulated aspect as well as the control with the intent of perfection to a scale that consumes all members of a metro instead of having a chose to living in that type of development Frank Lloyd Wright has presented a utopia that you have no choice but to accept.
ReplyDeleteI agree that it is not a practical solution, but it's interesting to think about different options of a community and how they deal with suburbanism. What if Broadacre City, or any other design for that matter, was how we lived and we didn't know any different?
ReplyDeleteLauren, i'm lovig that you are feeling very inspired and seemingly passionate about a historical theory that seems to really push boundaries of what we know and accept as suburban living. I can't wait for you to read more and more proposed solutions, concepts, and theories on suburbia because i think you may find even more insight into the contributors factors of the failure [and at times successes] of suburbia. i think that Laura makes some great observations about the counter-arguments for Broadacre City as well. In and of itself, Broadacre perhaps would have greater sprawl and greater dependence on the car than what we know now.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to think about this romantic view of the car that Wright shared with many others of the time, the great freedom, the "horizontal line" [highway], the luxury, the promises, without much concern about its effects and complex relationship it has currently created with its relationship to oil. Broadacre City can be admired for its extreme vision that was innovative in its time before much of this exists, but it truly is suburbia as we know it today. only fantasizing that our gas stations will be icons of architectural beauty.
read carefully this statement from Wright himself and ask yourself how it is truly different than say Omaha where each former town is now a division of suburban Omaha [Millard, Elkhorn]. Then ask yourself what architectural/design ideas, spaces, places are truly innovative and inspiring, progressive and interesting. Another question would be since when is 150 miles convenient? [that is a trip to Omaha and back] Finally, Broadacre City truly proposed to do away with, or abandon the Industrial City [or the city as we know it]. Can you imagine a world of repeated suburban developments [lots of Millards] without a downtown Omaha? That is wehre go to get "culturally connected".
"Imagine spacious landscaped highways …giant roads, themselves great architecture, pass public service stations, no longer eyesores, expanded to include all kinds of service and comfort. They unite and separate — separate and unite the series of diversified units, the farm units, the factory units, the roadside markets, the garden schools, the dwelling places (each on its acre of individually adorned and cultivated ground), the places for pleasure and leisure. All of these units so arranged and so integrated that each citizen of the future will have all forms of production, distribution, self improvement, enjoyment, within a radius of a hundred and fifty miles of his home now easily and speedily available by means of his car or plane. This integral whole composes the great city that I see embracing all of this country—the Broadacre City of tomorrow." - Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City.
But keep going to museums and reading and finding inspiration to help determine what you think is "wrong" and what you think is "right". that is learning.