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The disappearing city, [by] Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright, Frank Lloyd, 1867-1959. New York, W. F. Payson, [c1932]
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THE DISAPPEARING CITY
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
WILLIAM FARQUHAR PAYSON – NEW YORK
Copyright 1932
by William Farquhar Payson
New York
Printed in the United States of America
At the Stratford Press, Inc., New York.
THE NEW STANDARD OF SPACE MEASUREMENT
In previous times, too much legworlc being objectionable, and as human intercom munication could only be had by personal contacts, integration, commercial or social, was difficult—if it was not wholly lacking except as the city was a close built mart, a general meeting place and a distributing center. So, cities originally grew that way to serve a human need. Human concentration was once upj>n^time^a_jieoessity and not unmixed evil. Cities grew, aTsald~1>efore, as some organism within the organism thaTni^uTbody grew.T non-malignant, fnjrouTTum^rTsayTTT^ the parasitic tumoT characterized the centralized concentration called the city, as compared with the normal course of life in relation to natural environment, and agrarian or industrial work over wide agrarian areas. The cities of ancient civilization so grew, originally, to relieve a lack of such integration as is now modern and they have all perished. European cities have resisted skyscraper exploitation and are, still, nearer to human scale. But now, owing to organic change, assuming malignant character, our skyscraper exploited cities must continue to grow as symptoms of disease that is relieved by fever and discharging matter. Or death.
But to take a less abhorrent view, cities were the centralization needed by the unorganized life of the country and on terms of concentration necessary then, they served and, resisting exploitation, survived. But our American cities accepting such exaggeration with pride, have sucked the substance and the spirit of the very life they “centralized.” The country once needed the city just as the city needed the country because of the physical inabilities of overcoming distance owing to the necessities of such primitive communications as were then at work. But more and more as those primitive limitations disappeared by way of developed invention, the new discoveries of science and the increasing use of labor-saving devices upon super-materials, these new devices and resources perverted the city, and en abled the city to absorb more and more from the country life what the city could never repay.
Finally, by force of thoughtless habit, the principal effect of all these powerful, 25
fundamental, new physical resources which humanity itself has developed has been, in con fusion, to exaggerate the no longer necessary city into a threat against life itself.
Owing to the pressure of these fundamental changes the fever and the excitation of the urban ganglia have not only grown phenomenal. They have grown deadly.
To look at the plan of any great city is to look at the cross section of some fibrous tumor. Seen in the light of present space needs there is unnatural concentration of tissue, an accelerated but painfully forced circulation.
Out of essential concentration centripetal centralization became the industrial eco nomic force at work, unchecked. Unchecked. What force can check centralization?
Centralization, the social force that made kings, is the economic force that over built cities. Centralization, by way of the leverage of the vicarious power of machinery, has now proved to be something that, winding up space tighter and tighter, is like a centripetal device revolving at increasing speed until, out of control entirely turning centrifugal, it is ended only by dissipation or destruction. Centralization as a centripetal force knows accel eration. What other control?
Government? No. Only human intelligence grasping machine-power exaggeration and interference in
behalf of humanity in order to employ machines as organic agencies industrial, social, moral, of a new freedom: in this lies the only salvation from such urban centralization as the big city has become and the future of the machine age if the machine age has any future.
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THE NATURE OF MODERN RESOURCES
We have already mentioned these machine-ape agencjej of iha tmsn freedom which, centralization itself has done much to bring to efficiency and that have immeasurably wid ened the areas of man-movement. But to reiterate:
Agency number one. Electrification: so far as communication is concerned, the city may now scatter. There is little advantage in a few blocks apart over ten miles apart or a thousand miles so far as communication went or goes. Human thought has long ago been rendered ubiquitous by printing. But now not only thought but speech and movement become volatile. First the telegraph, then the telephone, then mobilization, now the radio, soon television and safe flight.
Agency number two: Steam had congested and coupled as short as possible all human devices for living comforts. Enters, the internal combustion engine that might safely ride anywhere, smoothly working as it went. The motor-ship, the automobile, and the air plane came along; and so far as human movement by transport went, a few hundred feet had little advantage over a mile, and a mile not much advantage over ten. Hard roads began to be developed as avenues of swift, continuous motor communication.
Agency number three: Mechanical systems of refrigeration, heating and lighting make dependence upon the centralized service systems ot the city unnecessary and of small account or economy.
Agency number four: The new materials, steel-in-tension and concrete, glass and broad, thin, cheap sheets of metal and similar sheets of insulation make a new type of build ing possible by way of machinery that may open to environment and broaden the life of the individual in relation to the ground.
Agency number five: The mass production of the machine, shop fabrications can now make expensive utilities and accommodations cheap fdr alt concerned instead of ques tionable luxuries for the few.
So, naturally enough, here come the means to take all the real advantages of the 27
centralization known as the big city into the regional field we call the countryside and unite them with the features of the ground in that union we call modern architecture in that native creation we call the beauty of the country. The disadvantages of the city may all be left behind, for “finance” and prostitution until they too become regenerate.
Modern architecture now comes with its new demand for a finer integrity to unite “modern-improvements” in the service of the individual. Integration as against centralization is the true corollary of the ideal “Democracy” and decentralization and integration come in as architecture to go to work over the whole land to create a better basis and recreate the framework and background of a modern life run too far out of human scale. Man must now nbe brought back to his inheritance that he may be a whole man. Nor is there longer excuse for him to be the parasite that centralization has been making of him.
But all these new forms of liberation are not yet working freely for mankind in this way. They are not yet owned by the man. They are owned by the forces of centralization that own the cities and mechanically so far as may be they are warped to triplex economic distortion instead of being devoted to the conservation of a growing human life.
Nevertheless, we may be sure that “all one does for or against the truth serves it equally well.”
It is well within the internal nature and power of these forces, themselves organic, to destroy these systems that blindly usurp and warp them and deprive humanity, for the time being, of all but a small fragment of the benefits of new resources in machine power and super-materials.
The practical solution is a matter of social structure. But it is more a matter of what we call architecture. It is modern architecture that must lead the way out of this blind collision 28
of forces and away from the perversions of our democratic ideal. End a waste of life not natural to our experiment in civilization.
Let us learn to see life as organic architecture and learn to see organic architecture as life. Be sure that great life will have a great architecture.
WHAT THE TRAFFIC PROBLEM REALLY MEANS TO THE MAN IN THE STREET
In art or architecture any imitative eclecticism, however sophisticated, is only some form of sentimentality. At best it can be no more than some exploitation of something ready- made. At worst it is a kind of thievery. The jackdaw, the magpie, the cuckoo. The monkey.
The “Experiment” has consciously known the artist only as a sophisticate sentimen talist. The sentimentalist, at the moment, be it said, is trying hard to see himself as a func tionalist. But the sentimentalist’s faith learns no such lessons and, to date, his effort is only another form of his usual expediency—imitative eclecticism.
Too long the artist has tried to pick and choose his “effects” ready made and oppor tunely lead his life instead of letting life lead him, and teach him how to work and live honestly and effectively.
The artist’s faith still lies, as it has since the birth of the republic, in expedients. So long as he remains “unnatural” how can he build for the future?
Only the radical faith that keeps faith with radical life itself is practical where any true building is to be done.
So, let us approach the traffic problem as a human problem—that is the essential problem the congested city now presents—not as mere tinker or as some garage-mechanic, nor childish, try to tear the out-moded city down to get the green pastures in and set the city up in them again on its old site—feudal towers only a little further apart.
Vested interests once invested cannot be divested except by agreement. They will not agree.
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With an architect’s vision, let us observe the natural law of organic growth at work upon the city as change: seeking the sequence to provide for inevitable consequences.
Enough blind-alley nonsense has been talked about congestion, by skyscraperites, obscuring the simple issue. Of what practical use is this expedient imagery of super-space- makers for rent? To enable super-landlords to have and to hold the super-millions in super- concentration to make super-millions of superfluous millions?
For organic reasons the “traffic-problem” as we call the more obvious problem of the city streets is insoluble for the future on any basis satisfactory to human life within any busy city we have.
The instincts of the amorphous human herd exploited by the city, swarm with the swarm in the erstwhile village streets, but the swarm is taking wing—or to wheels which is much the same thing because increased facilities of lateral movement are comparative flight. A fond human dream is about to be realized.
By means of the motor car and the collateral inventions that are here with it, the horizon of the individual has immeasurably widened. It is significant that not only have space- values entirely changed with the new standard: It is more important that the new sense of spacing based upon the man in his motor car is now at work upon the man himself. Any ride high into the air in any elevator to-day only shows him how far he can soon go on the ground. And it is this view of the horizon that gives him the desire to go. If he has the means he goes. He has the means—his car—and his horizon widens as he goes.
This physical release is at work upon his character. His selfish interests might easily multiply and pile him up senselessly in tiers of cells,
ad infinitum when he got his release and may still do so. Still dazed by his new freedom, he
is like some bird born in captivity to whom the door of his cage has been opened. Some time, soon, he will learn that he can fly and when he learns that he is free, he is gone.
After all he is the city? So the city is going where and as he goes, and he will be gone where he may enjoy all that the centralized city ever really gave him plus the security, freedom and beauty of the ground that will be his. 30
That means that the citizen is going to the country with his machine by means of the machine, in larger sense, that is opening the way for him to be a better citizen in a better city in a better country.
Considering this traffic-problem, reflect that the present city is yet only about one tenth the motor car city it will be, if machine made promises to the man tied to the machine are ever kept. Any dutiful devotion to the machine on his part to-day should mean a motor car, comparative flight—or it means a moron for a citizen. Or a maniac. The citizen and his increase either have a car or dream of having one, envying the neighbor the one or two or three which he already has.
If grid-iron congestion is crucifixion now, what will the “grid-iron” be like when mul tiplied within a few years as many times by “success” as is inevitable?
Roughly* calculate the mass of machines that machine-age “success” must mean to the overgrown city of one of several to six million, people. More than one half the number of private cars; perhaps one twenty-fifth as many trucks and as many delivery machines; one fiftieth as many busses displacing street car tracks and unwholesome subways; thousands of taxi-cabs cruising about meantime. With room enough for each incidental transient, in his machine-bulk, to function at all lengthwise, the mass would fill the busy city channels above the tenth story.
Allowing for the criss-cross on the gridiron, making every street only half-time effi cient and the mass would double and pile up over the skyscrapers themselves. Call this exag geration and cut it in two—then cut it in two again, to be rash. There will be enough left, at the rate of increase “success” will bring, to put Manhattan and its kind out of commission with its own motors and those of inevitable transients in streets that can at best be but fifty per cent efficient owing to the crisscross of the gridiron.
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And reflect upon the fact that the motor car has just begun on the cities. Then why deck or double deck or triple deck city-streets at a cost of billions of dollars only to invite further increase and eventually meet inevitable defeat?
Why not allow citizenship to keep the billions it would have to pay for “decking” to buy more motor cars and get out and get more out of living in a more natural and fruitful life as freedom dawns on the citizen as for him? As the new freedom of our ideal dawns, the utility of the city vanishes by way of the machine that built it.
Yes, democracy means just that freedom for the citizen, by machine, if the machine is going to work for the citizen; and who can stop it now from going to work for him volun tarily as it is working involuntarily?
Let us repeat: monarchy was the ideal of centralization . . . the unit—no emphasis upon individuality—compelled to revolve around about a common center, so democracy is the ideal of integration . . . many units free in themselves built up high in the quality of indi viduality, functioning together in freedom.
Consider that monarchy has fallen. It mortified democratic individuality. And our cap italistic system, if it persists as a form of centralization, stands to fall for the same reason. Electrified mechanical-forces employed in building our modern world are now, by nature out- moding it and turning upon it to destroy it.
Centripetal centralization, whether as the city, the factory, the school or farm, now not only has the spiritual forces of democracy to work against, but by way of this traffic- problem has the enormous power of the machine-age setting in, dead against it because it is in the nature of universal or ubiquitous mobilization that the city spreads out far away and thin.
It is in the nature of flying that it disappears. It is in the nature of universal electrification that the city is nowhere or everywhere. Centralization, by way of the Usonian city, has had a big day but not a relatively long
day. As a matter of course it is not dead yet. But it is easy, now, to see that it is no longer either a necessity or a luxury. Universal mobilization of the human animal, volatilization of 32
his thought, voice and vision are making the city as troublesome interference to human life as “static” is troublesome to radio.
Already the man may get more out of his new release, by way of increased facility for lateral movement, than ever came to him before in the history of his race. Imagine, then, what is coming to him in the next twenty-five yearsl
Democracy reintegrated as the systematized integration of small individual units built up high in quality of individuality is a practical and rational ideal of freedom: machine in hand. Division of the exaggerated commercial-enterprise into more effective smaller units and reintegration over the whole surface of the nation—this is now no less practical. Communal ownership by way of taxation of all communal resources is not necessarily com munism, as Henry George pointed out with complete logic. It may be entirely democratic.
So the Broadacre City is not only the only democratic city. It is the only possible city looking toward the future. Exaggerated vertical lanes of transport impinging upon con gested, narrow horizontal lanes; tall channels as “courts” ruinous to privacy, makeshifts for light and air in offices or habitations, towering concrete shelves and pigeonholes for human dwellings, these are landlord expedients to have done with. They are no human solution of any “traffic problem” because there is no life in them. There is only rent. As for the proposed improvement, “by modernism,” securing privacy by hermetically sealed and blinded buildings, hot air circulating between two glass surfaces opaque or transparent, that proposed expedient means to heat the inside and the outside impartially—50-50—with no gratitude from the out side. And 1000 people to the “hectare” (two and a half acres) is looking not so far ahead. That is, now, 990 too many.
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GENERAL VIEW OF THE BROADACRE CITY OF THE FUTURE BASED UPON THE NEW SCALE OF SPACING
In the City of Yesterday ground space was reckoned by the square foot. In the City of Tomorrow ground space will be reckoned by the acre: an acre to the family. This seems a modest minimum if we consider that if all the inhabitants of the world were to stand upright together they would scarcely occupy the island of Bermuda. And reflect that in these United States there is more than 57 acres of land, each, for every man, woman and child within its borders.
On this basis of an acre to the family architecture would come again into the service, not of the landlord, but of the man himself as an organic feature of his own ground. Architecture would no longer be merely adapted, commercialized space to be sold and resold by taximeter—no more standing room than competition demands.
Ground space is the essential basis of the new city of a new life.
The present form of the motor car is crude and imitative compared with the varied forms of fleet machines, beautiful as such, manufacturers will soon be inclined or be soon compelled to make.
The flying machine is yet a more or less extravagant, experimental form, unwieldy in scale, and with its exaggerated wings imitating a bird it is yet a hostage that gives itself to the mercy of the elements. No more than a primitive step in evolution.
Teletransmissions of sight and sound, too, are not only experimental they are in their infancy as is the intelligence to which their operation is entrusted.
We are justly proud of the great network of highways, the hardroads systems of the country. But they too are in their infancy. We are only just beginning to build them.
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Young as the highway system is , however, it requires but little imagination to see in
the great highway and see in the power of all these new resources of machines and materials
a new physical release of human activity within reach of everyone . . . not only as adventure and romance with nature but a basis for safer, saner, less anxious life for a sane and dignified free people. A longer, happier life waits, naturally, upon this changed sense of a changed space relationship.
Any man once square with his own acre or so of ground is sure of a living for him self and his own and sure of some invigorating association with beauty. Not only is the city itself a stricture, a handicap in production: the contributing railroad itself is too limited in movement, too expensively clumsy and too slow in operation. The end of the day of the long or short back and forth haul demanded by centralization is in sight. The end, too, of mass transport by iron rail.
Imagine spacious landscaped highways, grade crossings eliminated, “by-passing” living areas, devoid of the already archaic telegraph and telephone poles and wires and free of blaring bill boards and obsolete construction. Imagine these great highways, safe in width and grade, bright with wayside flowers, cool with shade trees, joined at intervals with fields from which the safe, noiseless transport planes take off and land. Giant roads, themselves great architecture, pass public service stations, no longer eyesores, expanded to include all kinds of service and comfort. They unite and separate—separate and unite the series of diversified units, the farm units, the factory units, the roadside markets, the garden schools, the dwelling places (each on its acre of individually adorned and cultivated ground), the places for pleasure and leisure. All of these units so arranged and so integrated that each citizen of the future will have all forms of production, distribution, self improvement, enjoy ment, within a radius of a hundred and fifty miles of his home now easily and speedily avail able by means of his car or his plane. This integral whole composes the great city that I see embracing all of this country—the Broadacre City of tomorrow.
It is because every man will own his acre of home ground, that architecture will be
in the service of the man himself, creating appropriate new buildings in harmony not only 44
with the ground but harmonious with the pattern of the personal life of the individual. No two homes, no two gardens, none of the three to ten acre farm units, no two factory buildings need be alike. There need be no special “styles,” but style everywhere.
Light, strong houses and workplaces will be solidly and sympathetically built out of the nature of the ground into sunlight. Factory workers will live on acre home units within walking distance or a short ride away from the future factories. Factories beautiful^ smoke less and noiseless. No longer will the farmer envy the urban dweller his mechanical improve- mentTwTTile the latter in turn covets his “green pastures.”
Each factory and farm would be within a ten mile radius of a vast and variegated wayside market, so that each can serve the other simply and effectively and both can serve that-etlier .portion of the population which lives and works in the neighborhood of that mar ket. No longer will any need exist for futile racing to a common center and racing l>ack again crucifying life just to keep things piled up and “big.” /
Without air, sunlight, jand. jiuman life cannot go on. Recognizing this principle, as we are all beginning to do, the home life of tomorrow will conform. It will eliminate no modern comforts, yet keep the age-less healthgiving comforts too. Steel and glass will be called in to fulfill their own—steel for strength, durability and lightness; translucent glass, enclosing interior space, would give privacy yet make of living in a house a delightful asso ciation with sun, with sky, with surrounding gardens. The home would be an indoor garden, the_gaxdjm an outdoor house.
Tall buildings are not barred, but having no interior courts, they must stand free in natural parks. A “co-operative” apartment house might be eighteen stories, perhaps: tier on tier of immense glass screen-walls golden with sun, on shining steel or copper-sheathed frames, each tier with its flower and vine festooned balcony terrace, an iridescence of vivid color, the whole standing in generously parked and blossoming grounds.
The principles of architecture are simply the principles of life. Just as a house built on makeshift foundations cannot stand, so life set on makeshift character in a makeshift country cannot endure. Good and lasting architecture gives or concedes the right to all of
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us to live abundantly in the exuberance that is beauty— in the sense that William Blake defined exuberance. He did not mean excess. He meant according to nature, without stint. Thus, also, must good and lasting life yield up that right to all of us. And the only secure foundation for such life is enlightened human character which will understandingly accept, not merely ape the organic relation between the welfare of one and the welfare of the whole. Only that sort of character is fit for and able to create a permanent and universal well being.
And good architecture and the civilized architect of the future are necessarily modern, because life itself continually changes and new forms of building are needed to contain and express it sincerely without waste, loving beauty.
To put it concretely again, architectural values are human values or they are not valuable. Human values are life giving, not life taking. When one is content to build for one self alone talcing the natural rights of life, breadth and light and space, away from one’s neighbor, the result is some such monstrosity as the pretentious skyscraper. It stands for a while in the business slum formed by its own greed, selfishly casting its shadow on its neigh bors, only to find that it, too, is dependent upon their success and must fail with their failure.
What life to give has the toll-gatherer the big city has become, to the worth while citizen now that the motor car stands at the door: the great, hard road systems of the country beckoning?
Voices and vision everywhere are penetrating solid walls to entertain and inform him wherever and as he goes, and when general and immediate distribution of everything he needs is becoming convenient to him wherever he may happen to be and or choose to live. I see his buildings modern, sanitary, living conveniences, his wherever he is or wants to be, and as economically as his motor car is his— by a few hours’ devotion to machinery. I see the factory too, divided and operated in humane proportions not far away from him in the country; the time spent in any ceaseless to and fro from the office, senseless and waste time that may be well spent in the new individual centralization—the only one that is a real neces sity, or a great luxury or a great human asset—his diversified modern Home. I see that home 46
not so far away from the diversified farm units but that they may bring him, at the highway wayside markets, as he passes, food, fresh every hour.
I can see “going places” a luxury and a pleasure to him and to his; and beautiful places to which he can go. I see his children going to small and smaller individual garden schools in parks that are playgrounds as their parents live individual lives that enrich the communal life by the very quality of its individuality in a beauty of life that is appropriate luxury and superior common sense.
Transport, buildings, all life spaciously intimate with the ground, all appropriate to each other and life to each and every man according to his nature or his meed and love of life. Woods, streams, mountains, ranges of hills, the great plains—all are shrines, beauty to be preserved. Architecture and acreage seen as landscape.
Imagination is our human divinity. It alone may distinguish the human herd and save it from the fate that has overtaken all other herds, human or animal. All this leads the way to the realization of a new civilization with an architecture of its own which will make the machine its slave and create nobler longings for mankind.
ARCHITECTURE AND ACREAGE SEEN AS LANDSCAPE
The architectural features of the Broadacre City will arise naturally out of the nature and character of the ground on which it stands and of which it is a component if not organic feature.
The individual architectural features themselves would naturally harmonize with the
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