Stephen Alexander looks at the philosophy behind Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1935 ‘Broadacre City’ project.

‘Frank Lloyd Wright’s Utopia’ by Stephen Alexander from the New Masses. Vol. 15 No. 12. June 18, 1935.

THE most recent of the Big Business Fairs to be housed in Mr. Rockefeller’s monument to himself is called “The Industrial Arts Exposition- A Preview of Prosperity” (no fooling), and if it is still going when this appears, you are hereby advised not to waste your time or money on it.  It is somewhat amazing and very instructive to learn what can be included under the term Industrial Art, these days. The latest orange drink, corn plaster, automobile polish, life insurance, Encyclopedia Britannica, etc., and a nice Police Department booth with an elaborate display of “our modern efficiency” are now Art. Also included are a few objects, mainly utilitarian, whose efficient functioning and economy of manufacture have resulted in good design. They are hard to find amidst the general welter of junk.

The most important display in the exhibition is Frank Lloyd Wright’s set of scale models for his “Broadacre City, A New Community Plan,” which is explained and illustrated in a ten-cent brochure that presents his ideas on architecture in general and community planning in particular. Briefly, Mr. Wright offers as a solution, not only for architecture but for everything that’s wrong with present-day society, Decentralization. In fact his opening sentence lists “decentralization” as “one of the inherent rights of man.” He has worked out a “four­square-miles-1,400 families” unit which is intended to be self-contained and includes little farms, little homes for industry, little factories, little schools, a little university going to the people mostly by way of their interest in the ground, little laboratories on their own ground for professional men.

He sums up in a paragraph, as follows:

“To reiterate: the basis of the whole is general decentralization, free use of the ground held only by use and improvements; public utilities and government itself owned by the people of Broadacre City; privacy on one’s own ground for all and fair means of subsistence for all by way of their work on their own ground or in common offices serving the life of the whole. Individuality established on such terms must thrive, Unwholesome life would get no encouragement and the ghastly heritage left by overcrowding in over­done ultra-capitalistic centers would be likely to disappear in three or four generations.”

Despite his badly confused notions of the nature of social forces in our society (only a serious and completely sincere person could have written such a naive concoction of adolescent idealism and Wellsian it’s-all-done­ with-push-buttons  fiction) Frank Lloyd Wright must be regarded as one of the important forces in progressive American architectural thought. This not only for his distinguished record of achievement and courageous pioneering over a long period of years, but because his creative talents and intellectual integrity have driven him forward by the inner logic of his craft to an anti-capitalist position. He is virtually alone among the prominent architects of this country in his approach to the fundamental problems of present-day architecture as primarily socio­economic. He posits as basic in his scheme such profound changes as

“free use of the ground…ownership of government and utilities by the people…a fair means of subsistence for everyone…etc.”

without seeming to understand what these things mean, nor how they can be attained. He has simply taken author’s license to create a utopia of his own making. He has provided houses, factories, offices, etc., that have adequate light, space, air, facilities and many other of the desirables of good living.

He has a generally healthy sense of values as to what constitutes “an ideal life,” in terms of material welfare and socially-useful activity by the individual, but it is this very approach to the problem as one of simply drawing up the blueprints for “the ideal life” that makes the project irrelevant and even ludicrous as a program for American architecture today. No truly progressive community planning can be founded on any other than the immediate (as well as future) needs, political and material, of the exploited working population of the country. Beyond the broadest of generalities it is very difficult to say what is usable in Mr. Wright’s project for a “future society.” We are safe in aiming at decent living and working conditions (as understood in terms of present-day standards of technology) for the entire population, but whether housing and industry should be on the basis of large or small-scale units is not a question that can be settled by arbitrary fiat. Any practicable revolutionary program for American architecture today will have to utilize the existing large­-scale units as a basis for immediate needs, while planning for gradual modification toward a more decentralized economy; but to what extent and in what form this decentralization will take place is premature (though perhaps interesting) speculation.

As far as relevance to an immediate program is concerned, the significance of Mr. Wright’s project is that it points inexorably to the necessity for the removal of capitalism and the creation of a socialist society as the primary condition for the progressive development of architecture.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s to early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway, Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and more journalistic in its tone.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1935/v15n12-jun-18-1935-NM.pdf