Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City

The MoMA is huge; I mean six stories of sprawling floor plans exhibiting a new artist every couple of rooms. There was Sigmar Polke with his floor to ceiling prints of towers that represented not only WWII internment camps, but lifeguarding positions. The obvious irony there is unnerving and beautiful. There was pop-art, the classic Campbell’s soup can prints by Warhol who claimed he “wanted to be like a machine.” But what struck me the most was Frank Lloyd Wright’s notion of what could be the ‘perfect city.’ Broadacre City was his brainchild: he believed that the present city has nothing to give its citizens as it is so centralized it has no method of internal regeneration. He wanted a decentralized city of skyscrapers, ones that were economic without feeding into capitalist culture, and was a proponent for what would later become urban sprawl (though he suggested a more organized migration from the city). These buildings in Broadacre were clad in entirely transparent glass facades; they skipped the platitudes to go straight to flying slabs whose lightweight material outweighed all then-contemporary masonry. He was all about avoiding shadows in his city, and allowing all men and women at least one acre to themselves. Idyllic, and probably improbable, but wonderful nonetheless.