Broadacre City: Frank Lloyd Wrights vision of an organic capitalism

In April 1935, at the Industrial Arts Exposition organized by the National Alliance of Art and Industry inside the Rockefeller Center in New York City, a model by architect Frank Lloyd Wright was put on display. This model, which has subsequently become very famous, depicted his vision of Broadacre City. Although it has continued to captivate, the public has often disregarded the project’s economic, political and social dimensions that the model sought to illustrate. With Broadacres, Wright inserted himself into the lively debates happening on the American political and economic scene in the 1920s and 1930s. A native of Wisconsin and deeply attached to the culture of the Midwest, Wright was influenced by the kind of progressive culture that developed in the late nineteenth century – first in the state of Wisconsin, then in Chicago, where he rubbed shoulders with intellectuals in the capital of the Midwest. With Broadacre City, Wright was looking to offer a spatial and architectural transcription of the “organic capitalism†that he was promoting at the time: a capitalism that respects the Earth and the men who inhabit it, the only one that would be compatible with the type of democracy he called for.