11-07-2014, 07:46 AM
Broad acre city
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT 1932-1959
• The idea of Broad acre City, or as Wright often referred to it – Broad acres, was developed at the pinnacle of Wright’s professional career and late in his life.
• Wright’s discontent with the city arose in the years of the Great Depression which occurred some years after the Great War (1914-1918) as a result of the Stock Market Crash of 1929. He viewed the centralization of cities as “overbuilt”.
• He mocked the idea that a man in his right mind would leave the opportunities granted in the countryside to live in the confines of the overcrowded city. As one author is quick to point out,Wright is the product of an agrarian society, his interest in architecture possibly fuelled by an
early interest in geometry.
• He felt city as it was, centralized, was demoralizing the individual by the pressure created from the concept of rent – rent for land, rent for money and traffic in invention. He further surmises that the Great Depression is a direct result of the government and private enterprises controlling profits and giving the wageslave a false sense of prosperity, thus inverting disrupting the equilibrium of a capitalism base – apex at the ground and base in the air.
It would fall for the same reason that masonry or monarchy falls, as all despotism surely falls: the law of gravitation and the law of diminishing returns (a law of nature).
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT 1932-1959
• The idea of Broad acre City, or as Wright often referred to it – Broad acres, was developed at the pinnacle of Wright’s professional career and late in his life.
• Wright’s discontent with the city arose in the years of the Great Depression which occurred some years after the Great War (1914-1918) as a result of the Stock Market Crash of 1929. He viewed the centralization of cities as “overbuilt”.
• He mocked the idea that a man in his right mind would leave the opportunities granted in the countryside to live in the confines of the overcrowded city. As one author is quick to point out,Wright is the product of an agrarian society, his interest in architecture possibly fuelled by an
early interest in geometry.
• He felt city as it was, centralized, was demoralizing the individual by the pressure created from the concept of rent – rent for land, rent for money and traffic in invention. He further surmises that the Great Depression is a direct result of the government and private enterprises controlling profits and giving the wageslave a false sense of prosperity, thus inverting disrupting the equilibrium of a capitalism base – apex at the ground and base in the air.
It would fall for the same reason that masonry or monarchy falls, as all despotism surely falls: the law of gravitation and the law of diminishing returns (a law of nature).