This weekend the Museum of Modern Art will open a new Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit which will examine the growing American city in the early 20th century. The exhibit—called Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal—will feature some recently acquired items from Frank Lloyd Wright's extensive archive by MoMA and Columbia University's Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. It will run through June 1st. From the press release:
"Wright was deeply ambivalent about cities. For decades, Wright was seen as the prophet of America's post-World War II suburban sprawl, yet the dispersed cities that he envisaged were also carefully planned—quite distinct from the disorganized landscapes that often developed instead. Paradoxically, Wright was also a lifelong prophet of the race for height that has played out around the world. Through an initial selection of drawings, films, and large-scale architectural models, the exhibition examines the tension in Wright's thinking about the growing American city from the 1920s to the 1950s, when he worked simultaneously on radical new forms for the skyscraper and on a comprehensive plan for the urbanization of the American landscape titled Broadacre City."
Broadacre City will be prominently featured in the exhibit and will include Wright's 12-foot-by-12-foot model of his plan, which "embodied his quest for a city of private houses set in nature and spread across the countryside. He believed that advances in technology had rendered obsolete the dense cities created by industry and immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries." The model was updated and refined throughout Wright's life, and toured the country in the 1930s, starting out at Rockefeller Center. Here's Wright discussing the city, and his Broadacre City, in 1958—about a year before his death.
And at least some of what Wright envisioned has come to be—in Return to the Center: Culture, Public Space, and City-Building in a Global Era, author Lawrence Herzog notes that Wright "celebrated new electronic technologies that would allow city dwellers to enjoy the consumption of social experiences—movies, opera, theater, concerts—in their own homes, experiences previously would have brought them out into the public realm of the city"... but at least we still have the option of experiencing these things outside of our apartments.
