Abstract
In 1940, Frank Lloyd Wright distributed the new publication called Taliesin, entirely made by the Taliesin Fellowship, and entitled “The New Frontier: Broadacre City”. The entire issue was totally dedicated to the project of Broadacre City, presented for the first time to the general public in April 1935, under the auspices of the National Alliance of Arts and Industry organized at the Rockefeller Centre, in New York. This issue contained all the articles written or interviews given by Wright about Broadacre City since 1935. It was distributed as part of the “campaign” led by the Taliesin Fellowship to promote Broadacre City’s principles to a larger audience. To what “frontier” does Wright refer with this title? What is the real meaning of the decentralized—and very horizontal—organization of Broadacre City? And why does it speak to us today?
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Notes
- 1.
The first one if we don’t consider the issue of 1934, which was also untitled Taliesin, vol. 1, n° 1, 1934.
- 2.
Taliesin, Vol. 1, n°1, « The New Frontier: Broadacre City », Mineral Point (Wisconsin), Democrat-Tribune Press, October 1940.
- 3.
This article is based on Maumi (2015).
- 4.
The school of architecture founded by Wright in 1932.
- 5.
Wright started to use this term beginning of the 1920s to refer to the inhabitants of the United States. Usonia refers to the United States of North American finally become a democratic nation as imagined by the Founding fathers of the new Republic, Thomas Jefferson being the main reference for Wright, with Thomas Paine.
- 6.
- 7.
Instead of metropolisation, we would speak, today, about global economy.
- 8.
It is essential, in order to understand this specific relation to nature, to read Wright’s main references: David Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman; furthermore, Wright’s thought is also based on his own experience on his uncle’s farm during his childhood, as well as on the teaching experimented by his aunts in their school, one of the first progressive schools opened in Wisconsin.
- 9.
First published in German in 1916, and translated in English in 1929 by Philip Pye, Berlin, Neo-verlag.
- 10.
Wright refers to Broadacre City.
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Maumi, C. (2018). The Echoes of Broadacre City in the Twenty-First Century. In: Viganò, P., Cavalieri, C., Barcelloni Corte, M. (eds) The Horizontal Metropolis Between Urbanism and Urbanization. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75975-3_5
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