building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

The revision of the Broadacre project, carried out in the 1950’s [Figure 51], and the
design of The Illinois, the mile‐high skyscraper, represent the real contradictions of a
system that Wright had demonstrated as being capable of adapting not to an
abstract territory, but to one that really existed. It is his extraordinary architectural
works, items of great quality inserted at a later date into the city landscape, which
in some way undermine its structure just because they are there.
Wright’s most mature, poetic contribution to Broadacre is not to be found in his
ample panoramic vistas he prepared for the edition of The Living City (1958), but in
his identification of urban planning as landscaping to imagine a city‐environment
continuum [Figure 51]. It is just the variety of the landscapes imagined and
proposed by Wright that is most attractive. What is most attractive is really the
variety of landscapes Wright imagined and proposed. If, on the one hand, there is a
natural landscape which can penetrate the folds of the grid (such as the river which
crosses the ground plan of Broadacre) or which can provide a third dimension by
breaking down the two‐dimensional checkerboard pattern (such as the hill placed in
a corner quadrant, which Wright exploited to include a residential neighbourhood
with larger houses), on the other hand, there is the landscape of the vegetable and
flower gardens, the orchards and the farms, which is typical of the American
agrarian culture.
Bruno Zevi, who was one of the few historians with a profound interest in the ideas
expressed at Broadacre and, in a wider sense, in Wright's architecture, approached
the critical point of organic planning by suggesting an interpretative reading aimed
at promoting the project. His critical analysis reappraises Wright’s programme in
the light of the debates regarding the city, which were typical at the end of the
1970’s. Zevi's considerations appear verisimilar even today:
The anti‐urban polemic is a constant feature of American culture […]
[Broadacre's, editor’s note] model was exhibited, in 1934, at the
Rockefeller Center in New York and, later, in many American and
European cities. The town planners considered it the outcome of a
romantic spirit, still deep in the nineteenth century and linked to a rural
ideal. Only at the beginning of the 1970’s, when the concept of cityregion
or city‐territory came up, it was understood that Wright had been
the only one to foresee the degradation and the collapse of the urban
concentrations, and to indicate a serious alternative. Once the ideas of
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