SOURCE: "Broadacre City: Frank Lloyd Wright's Utopia," in The Centennial Review, Vol. 25, No. 3, Summer, 1981, pp. 239-56.

In the following essay, Dougherty describes Wright's Utopian vision of a reintegrated America—"Broadacre City. "

I

For the last thirty years of his long life, Frank Lloyd Wright's work was directed by his vision of an ideal city, called Broadacre City. Though primarily a domestic architect, and a resident of rural Wisconsin and the Arizona desert, he wanted to plan a city. In The Disappearing City (1932) he proclaimed that the megalopolis soon would begin to disappear, absorbed into a new city invisible because it would extend over the entire nation. In 1935 he and the apprentices of his Taliesin Fellowship assembled a twelve-foot-square model of a representative section of Broadacre City, a model displayed first in Rockefeller Center and then in other exhibitions in America and Europe. In the 1940's he revised and...