Frank Lloyd Wright

In the early 1930s, Wright began working on a suburban development of family-run farms organized around a central market. His collaborator Walter V. Davidson was a retail and warehouse management consultant with expertise in conducting “motion studies.” These studies analyzed the repetitive movements of industrial workers in order to identify ways to increase their efficiency. Here, Wright applied this methodology to optimize the layout of a farm’s livestock pens, greenhouses, silos, and packing areas. Although none were ever built, Wright later incorporated these streamlined farm units and markets into his model for Broadacre City.

The Broadacre City model was first exhibited during the Great Depression, and its aim of revitalizing nonurban areas was shared by New Deal agencies like the Resettlement Administration (RA), which sponsored the housing and livelihoods of semirural residents. In fact, while the model was touring Washington, DC, Wright sought an audience with Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt, hoping to secure a commission to design a suburban development as part of the Greenbelt Towns program. Funded by the RA, the venture was intended to build ground-up communities on the outskirts of major cities. In recent years, however, historians have highlighted the program’s exclusion of African Americans. Wright’s attempt to enact Broadacre through such a project prompts the question of what he imagined the racial makeup of his dream city to be.