As much as we admire build­ings designed by genius archi­tects, we have to admit that — some­times, just some­times — those genius archi­tects them­selves can be con­trol freaks. These ten­den­cies man­i­fest with a spe­cial clar­i­ty when a mak­er of indi­vid­ual struc­tures turns his mind toward build­ing, or knock­ing down and re-build­ing, the city as a whole. The Carte­sian grid of looka­like tow­ers on the green of Le Cor­busier’s Radi­ant City stand (or rather, the project hav­ing gone unbuilt, don’t stand) as per­haps the best-known image of urban­ism re-envi­sioned to suit a sin­gle archi­tec­t’s desires. In response, Frank Lloyd Wright came up with an urban Utopia of his own: Broad­acre City.

“Imag­ine spa­cious land­scaped high­ways,” Wright wrote in 1932, “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, enjoy­ment, with­in a radius of a hun­dred and fifty miles of his home now eas­i­ly and speed­i­ly avail­able by means of his car or plane.” 

Those words appeared in The Dis­ap­pear­ing City, a sort of man­i­festo about Wright’s hope for the indus­tri­al metrop­o­lis of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry: that it would go away. He “hat­ed cities,” writes The New York­er’s Mor­gan Meis. “He thought that they were cramped and crowd­ed, stu­pid­ly designed, or, more often, built with­out any sense of design at all.” Vis­i­tors to 2014’s Muse­um of Mod­ern Art exhi­bi­tion Frank Lloyd Wright and the City could behold not just Wright’s sketch­es of Broad­acre City but a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot mod­el of the (to the archi­tect) ide­al place, a re-think­ing of the urban with the sen­si­bil­i­ties of the rur­al. Almost eighty years before, 40,000 vis­i­tors to Rock­e­feller Cen­ter who first saw the mod­el saw it embla­zoned with such straight­for­ward dec­la­ra­tions as “No slum,” “No Scum,” and “No traf­fic prob­lems.”

Nel­son Rock­e­feller sup­port­ed the idea of Broad­acre city, as did Albert Ein­stein and John Dewey, all of whom signed a peti­tion Wright passed around in its favor in 1943. But “even in the 1930s, urban plan­ners were dis­gust­ed by Broad­acre,” writes Next City’s Kather­ine Don. “Its phi­los­o­phy was deeply indi­vid­u­al­is­tic; its lay­out was con­spic­u­ous­ly waste­ful. Lib­er­als of the time who emu­lat­ed the social­ist spir­it of Europe clas­si­fied Wright as an anti-gov­ern­ment eccen­tric, which indeed he was.” Matt Novak at Pale­o­fu­ture describes Wright’s utopia as “ulti­mate­ly an exten­sion of the things that made him per­son­al­ly com­fort­able: open spaces, the auto­mo­bile, and not sur­pris­ing­ly, the archi­tect as mas­ter con­troller.”

Image cour­tesy of MoMA

Though Wright and Le Cor­busier “shared an inter­est in dis­man­tling the rec­og­niz­able urban fab­ric, they had dif­fer­ent ideas about what should replace it,” writes City Jour­nal’s Antho­ny Palet­ta. The archi­tect of Falling­wa­ter thought it best for the city “not to be ratio­nal­ized but to be pas­tor­al­ized. Urban ills were to be dilut­ed by ample help­ings of prairie soil.” By the time he died in 1958, a sprawl­ing post­war Amer­i­ca had whole­heart­ed­ly adopt­ed his “new stan­dard of space mea­sure­ment — the man seat­ed in his auto­mo­bile.” But noth­ing as tech­no-pas­toral par­a­disi­a­cal as a Broad­acre ever came into being, and indeed, the sub­urbs turned out to grow in a fash­ion even more hap­haz­ard and irra­tional than the one that so dis­gust­ed him in tra­di­tion­al cities. Then again, a true per­fec­tion­ist — and a true artist — must grow accus­tomed to such dis­ap­point­ments.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a 360° Vir­tu­al Tour of Tal­iesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Per­son­al Home & Stu­dio

Frank Lloyd Wright Reflects on Cre­ativ­i­ty, Nature and Reli­gion in Rare 1957 Audio

The Mod­ernist Gas Sta­tions of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling­wa­ter Ani­mat­ed

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

“For aver­age prospec­tive house own­ers the choice between the hys­ter­ics who hope to solve hous­ing prob­lems by mag­ic alone and those who attempt to ride into the future pig­gy back on the sta­tus quo, the sit­u­a­tion is con­fus­ing and dis­cour­ag­ing.” Those words, as much as they could describe the sit­u­a­tion today, actu­al­ly came print­ed in Arts & Archi­tec­ture mag­a­zine’s issue of June 1945.

“There­fore it occurs to us that the only way in which any of us can find out any­thing will be to pose spe­cif­ic prob­lems in a spe­cif­ic pro­gram on a put-up-or-shut-up basis.” What the mag­a­zine, at the behest of its pub­lish­er John Enten­za, put up was the Case Study Hous­es, which defined the ide­al of the mid­cen­tu­ry mod­ern Amer­i­can home.

More specif­i­cal­ly, they defined the ide­al of the mid­cen­tu­ry mod­ern south­ern Cal­i­forn­ian home. Los Ange­les pro­vid­ed a promis­ing envi­ron­ment for many of the for­mi­da­ble Euro­pean minds who came to Amer­i­ca around the Sec­ond World War, includ­ing writ­ers like Aldous Hux­ley, com­posers like Arnold Schoen­berg, and philoso­phers like Theodor Adorno. Archi­tects, such as the ear­li­er arrival Richard Neu­tra, espe­cial­ly thrived in the young city’s vast space and under its bright sun, giv­ing shape to a new kind of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry house, one influ­enced by the rig­or­ous­ly clean aes­thet­ics of the Ger­man Bauhaus move­ment but adapt­ed to a much friend­lier cli­mate, both in terms of the weath­er and the free­dom from strict tra­di­tion.

Even if you don’t know archi­tec­ture, you know the Case Study hous­es from their count­less appear­ances in movies, tele­vi­sion, and print over the past sev­en­ty years. Soon­er or lat­er, every­one sees an image of Neu­tra’s Stu­art Bai­ley House, Charles and Ray Eames’ Eames House, or Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House. The decades have turned these and oth­er hous­es from the peak of mid­cen­tu­ry mod­ernism into price­less archi­tec­tur­al trea­sures — or at least extreme­ly high-priced archi­tec­tur­al trea­sures. Some open them­selves to tours now and again, but very few of us will ever have a chance to expe­ri­ence these hous­es as not qua­si-muse­ums but actu­al liv­able spaces.

Now we have the next best thing in the form of the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Archi­tec­tur­al Teach­ing Slide Col­lec­tion, which col­lects about 1300 rarely seen pho­tographs of mid­cen­tu­ry mod­ern hous­es shot all over the west­ern Unit­ed States from the 1940s to the 1960s by Koenig him­self, along with his col­league Fritz Block, who also hap­pened to own a col­or slide com­pa­ny. “Instead of the pol­ished tableaus you might find in the pages of Archi­tec­tur­al Digest,” writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Carey Dunne, “these spon­ta­neous snap­shots cap­ture quirky and more inti­mate views.” Koenig and Block cap­tured these hous­es “with an architect’s geo­met­ri­cal­ly mind­ed and detail-ori­ent­ed eye, nev­er pre­sent­ing them as mere real estate.” The archive also offers images of mod­els, blue­prints, and oth­er such tech­ni­cal mate­ri­als.

Arts & Archi­tec­ture meant to com­mis­sion ideas for the every­man’s house of the future, “sub­ject to the usu­al (and some­times regret­table) build­ing restric­tions,” “capa­ble of dupli­ca­tion,” and “in no sense… an indi­vid­ual ‘per­for­mance.’ ” Yet Amer­i­can mid­cen­tu­ry mod­ern hous­es, from the Case Study Pro­gram or else­where, all came out as indi­vid­ual per­for­mances, but also the first works of archi­tec­ture many of us get to know as works of art. And the work of archi­tec­tur­al pho­tog­ra­phers like Julius Shul­man, espe­cial­ly his icon­ic shot of the Stahl House high above the illu­mi­nat­ed grid of Los Ange­les, has done much to instill in view­ers a rev­er­ence suit­ed to art. A col­lec­tion of non-stan­dard views like these, though, reminds us that even the most vision­ary house is a real place. Enter the USC archive here.

All Images: via USC Dig­i­tal Library

via Hyper­al­ler­gic/Fast Co Design

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Quick Ani­mat­ed Tour of Icon­ic Mod­ernist Hous­es

A is for Archi­tec­ture: 1960 Doc­u­men­tary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Mod­ern Times 

The ABC of Archi­tects: An Ani­mat­ed Flip­book of Famous Archi­tects and Their Best-Known Build­ings

Bauhaus, Mod­ernism & Oth­er Design Move­ments Explained by New Ani­mat­ed Video Series

Watch 50+ Doc­u­men­taries on Famous Archi­tects & Build­ings: Bauhaus, Le Cor­busier, Hadid & Many More

Gehry’s Vision for Archi­tec­ture

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.