The exhibition, named after one of the phrases on a wooden panel of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre city model, questions the concepts and characteristics of what implies the statement “to live in America”. By several projects, the exhibition grasps two different approaches to housing throughout the mid-twentieth. On the one hand, Wright’s proposal for an exurban settlement compose by a single-family house, and on the other hand, large public or subsidized housing located in urban areas. This essay focus on comparing two projects displayed on the exhibition as a way to extract their concepts and daily life idea. The first one, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre city (1929-58) as an example of suburban living, and the second one, Paul Laurence Dunbar apartments (1926-28) as an urban housing project in Harlem, New York.
Starting with Broadacre city, Wright’s idea to decentralize the urban settlements in America was based on individualism and private ownership, in order to provide every head of household with an acre of land. This was a masterplan model inspired by the rural Midwestern scenery that included civic, cultural, and industrial buildings with a single-family house design in the middle of the landscape. As a low-density city, it incorporates 1,400 houses per 4 square miles. The project consists of an extended landscape of isolated objects related by generous broad streets. Moreover, with its continuous green areas, private and public, the buildings merge with the generic landscape including a hill and a river that should reflect the ability of the project to adapt to any condition. Because of this, it is interesting that the project didn’t have any definitive location, neither client, this means that the relationship with a previous context was completely irrelevant. The city was planned without borders itself, with the possibility of extension in the horizontal, but with a clear disconnection with the next existent city. The project could be related to a contemporary close condominium, as indicates Teresa P.R. Caldeira “Their advertisements [close condominiums] propose a “total way of life” which would represent an alternative to the quality of life offered by the city and it’s deteriorated public space” 1.
By contrast, the Paul Laurence Dunbar Apartments develops a communitarian way of living in an urban context in a dense and vertical neighborhood. The project was composed of six multifamily building with six stories each, articulated internal courtyards with communitarian gardens in the inside, and the inclusion of commercial spaces. With the idea of a garden apartment, the project shapes their 511 units with access from the inside courtyard, in contrast to the close façade that limits the interaction with the street. Despite being a self-contained neighborhood located in an urban area, the project integrated mix-used programs including bank, nursery, recreation areas, and commercial spaces. Because of this, even though the façade strong limits, the project blends into the urban fabric, thus it erases the physical perimeter that the project had. Furthermore, the idea of the commercial areas integrated into the project was created to foster a sense of community and to complement the actual neighborhood’s needs. These ideas could be reflected on posterior avant-garde works on the value of the context as a found place, reflected in Nigel Henderson’s pictures of children playing on the streets in Bethnal Green Neighborhood and their mix-use street concept as a value of the social and physical realities on the cities.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City first exhibition was displayed at the Industrial Arts Exposition at the Rockefeller Center, Midtown Manhattan in 1935. This could be understood as a contradiction of all the concepts that the project reflects, as a rejection to the urban crowded city. On another point of view, this could be read as a critic to the urban context, the act of installing an alternative exurban living could work as Diego Rivera’s 1932 mural in Rockefeller Center, “At the service of the Rockefellers, he will fix for eternity a Communist Fata Morgana in Manhattan – if not a “Kremlin on the banks of the Hudson”, at least a Red Square on Fifth Avenue” 2. But at the same time that Wright was exhibiting his ideas at the Rockefeller Center, John D. Rockefeller Jr. was financing The Paul Laurence Dunbar Apartments, as an affordable communitarian building in an urban context exclusively for African American residents.
Since Paul Laurence Dunbar Apartments where located in an urban context with the idea of integration, they couldn’t achieve this objective, first of all, as previously mentioned, the apartments were exclusively for African Americans residents, which generates, even more, segregation on the urban context. Secondly, because of the private financial model and the rejection of John D. Rockefeller Jr. of using public funds, the rent by that time was relatively high compared to similar housing options. Resulting in the reduction of the possibility of living in these apartments to a small group of people: the elite of the African American in New York City. At the same time, Wright’s project also creates a clear segregation on the urban fabric. Even though at the beginning the master plan anticipated a degree of economic diversity, the project focused on a resident that was implicitly white which fosters exclusion on the city, as it was expressed on the exhibition “the symbol of a predominantly white, nostalgic, and chauvinistic nation” 3.
Moreover, in both projects, there was an idea of control and surveillance of the everyday life “[Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers”. In the case of the Paul Laurence Dunbar Apartments, a set of rules of behavior controlled the aspects of social life: “drying clothes, wringing out mops, and storing milk bottles on windows sills were all prohibited” 4. In addition, because of the courtyard configuration, surveillance was generated in a peer to peer positive relation because of a permanent presence of the community in the public space: “there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street” 5, as Jane Jacobs expressed. The social control was also present in Broadacre city, where Wright created a series of religious, political and philosophical concepts that supposed to guide residents in their daily life. In the case of the street, it was a space for the car transportation, there is no walkable city, there was no space in-between, as Caldeira points “Therefore, public streets become spaces for elite’s circulation by car and for poor people’s circulation by foot or public transportation” 6. In this case, there are no eyes on the street, basically, is not needed because there are no strangers in this exurban city. “No longer using streets as spaces of sociability, the elite now wants to prevent street life from entering their enclaves” 7, thus control is given as a Foucault relation of surveillance of a permanent controlled environment, always as a vertical relation with power from which you can’t hide from.
In conclusion, the exhibition successfully allows the generation of contrast views on how to live in America. Also, both analyzed projects answer the question in different aspects, but neither of them achieves the social integration that they were looking for. Then, how we can start creating new models and ways of livings that re-think the relation with the street, the social fabric and the integration with the city? It is evident that this problem is still unanswered and applies to the contemporary discussion regarding housing crisis and gentrification in the city.
1 Caldeira, “Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation”, 309.
2 Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 225.
3 Culler, Deborah, director and Chief curator. “Broadacre city” Living in America exhibition, Frank Lloyd Wright, Harlem & Modern Housing. (2017).
4 Ibid
5 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 35
6 Caldeira, “Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation”, 309.
7 Ibid
Bibliography:
Caldeira, Theresa. “Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation,” Public Culture 8, no. 2 (1996).
Culler, Deborah, director and Chief curator. “Living in America exhibition, Frank Lloyd Wright, Harlem & Modern Housing”. (2017).
Foucault, Michel. “Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison”, translated by Alan Sheridan (1977; New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
Jacobs, Jane. “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (New York: Vintage Books, 1961). Koolhaas, Rem. “Delirious New York” (New York: Monacelli, 1994).