building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

This idea of dedicating a circular lot entirely to a dwelling was taken up again much
later and applied to the principles of the Usonian houses, when Wright was faced
with devising a master plan for Galesburg Country Homes, Galesburg, Michigan
(1947). This was a small, residential suburb, which included an orchard and a series
of small ponds immersed in nature and used to define the area boundaries. Bruce
Brooks Pfeiffer perceptively reconstructs the details:
The master plan for this sub vision reveals an innovative approach to
individual house plots where each is a complete circle. Forty‐two circles
represent the plots for 42 homes on 72 acres. Wright wrote: “The center
of each disk of ground once located by survey and diameter given, any
house owner can tell where his lot limits are. No lot line touches another
wherever the scheme is perfect. All interspaces are to be planted to
some native shrub like barberry or sumach, throwing a network of color
in pattern over the entire tract”. The plan was later modified to provide
21 homes, and then once again modified to provide 18. Four of the plots
were purchased by homeowners who came to Wright for their designs. 98
The same model was re‐proposed not only in the master plan for Parkwyn Village,
Kalamazoo, Michigan (1947) [Figure 56], in which Wright also pictured a central
building for use by the community, but also in the project called “Usonia II”, another
settlement design devised for the company Usonia Homes Inc. in Pleasantville, New
York (1947) 99 .
When it was the matter of planning Broadacre City, Wright provided a solution
which adhered to schemes that were already present within the territory [Figures
45‐50]. However, when he had the opportunity of planning a smaller, both practical
and dystopic settlement, he managed the needs for the picturesque by using a
circular module [Figure 56]. Wright did not adopt precise formulae to interpret the
landscape, rather he was convinced that architecture "is born and not
manufactured" 100 . This is the very reason why Wright was a great contemporary
interpreter of Jefferson’s ideal of belonging to the land. Wright did not restrict
himself to indicating the great American landscape; he saw in it the opportunity to
98 PFEIFFER, Bruce Brooks, Frank Lloyd Wright 1943‐1959. The Complete Works, Cologne, Taschen,
2009, p. 121
99 Ibid. p. 140 and p. 146
100 WRIGHT, Frank Lloyd, The Future of Architecture, New York, Horizon Press, 1953, p. 213
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