Frank Lloyd Wright's Urbanism

The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive shows how much the most famous American architect thought about cities. While MOMA presents two of his most famous urban proposals, Broadacre City, and the Mile-High Skyscraper, some lesser-known projects seemed more revelatory. In 1926, Wright imagine a nine-block area in Chicago’s Loop with skyways, traffic-dominated streets, and towers looming above lower buildings – recalling downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul. Six years later, during the Depression, Wright designed a farm unit that would enable farmers to live, work, and sell their produce in a single mixed-use development that today’s struggling farmers might want to consider. A third urban proposal, designed in 1946 for Galesburg Country Homes in Michigan, has single family homes occupying circular lawns with shared spaces between pairs of them, bringing to mind the rethinking of suburbia that Shane Coen and David Salmela proposed in Mayo Woodlands in Rochester, and realized with Jackson Meadow in Marine on St. Croix, MN. Wright may be famous for his architecture, but his urban ideas may be more significant over the long term. 

Tom Fisher