Frank Lloyd Wright’s Forgotten City

Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t just redefine the world of architecture, but also had grand ideas for how towns and entire cities might function.  Indeed, after he died, plans for thousands of unbuilt homes, buildings, skyscrapers, and cities were found and archived, showing just how prolific and brilliant his work was.

Broadacre City was his plan for a sweeping development that would embody a new style of living and traveling, and included sketches for futuristic buildings, pod-like cars, and even flying devices called aerotors that resemble the VTOL drones from the last few years.

He and his team created a model of the city in 1935, which he also wrote about in numerous books and drawings. The scale of the plan was mind-boggling, with the idea of every US family receiving a one acre plot of land, and a futuristic vehicle to get place to place.

Almost the complete opposite of dense urban building, it was a far-out idea, and one that obviously never got built. But the scope and scale were impressive, and the ideas worth revisiting, if only to see the imagination of Wright’s work.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation has created renderings that honor the original scale models and drawings that Wright proposed.