The truth about Utopias

Utopias are kingdoms of the imagination. So why bother with them?

How this video happened

What began as "Frank Lloyd Wright's Insane Utopia" became a much more meditative piece once I learned about the aforementioned "Insane Utopia."

I love doing a close read and deep research on a topic, but the more I dug into Wright's Broadacre City, the less it seemed to merit a super literal breakdown. How could this have been a realistic plan? Why was his writing larded with prose that was a cross between new age philosophy and influencer marketing? What did it actually mean?

Reading the papers linked below and talking with Stewart Hicks made me realize that using Broadacre as a lens for Utopias might be a more sustainable way to approach the topic. There were two benefits: I'd get to experiment with a different type of story, but I'd also still get to do the deep research that I find most rewarding (and I hope you do, too).

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Here's a link to the reaction video (for some paid tiers). I didn't send out a separate notification for this, let me know if that's a problem.

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The class divide in Broadacre City

Once you realize you don't understand Utopias, you start to understand them. This article is going to take the same course as the video: literal-minded explanatory ambitions, followed by an ascent to the mushy.

I had a superficial awareness of Thomas More's Utopia before starting this story, and I felt duty-bound to do some Wikipedia skimming. Lots of blather followed, but I did pick up on the satirical nature of the book and the presence of some weird decidely non-Utopic things, like slavery. We use Utopia as shorthand for a perfect world, but that shorthand is woefully inadequate.

That's clear in the world of Broadacre City, especially when it comes to class. I would have expected a certain amount of equality in an imaginary world where every person gets one acre of land, no questions asked — it seems like a Commie plot! The ample common goods (markets, community centers, public fair grounds, some sort of weird announcement pole that I don't fully understand) further underscores this impression.

Of course, not only was Wright not a Communist, but Broadacre isn't very equitable at all. It includes lots of class divisions you'll find in the real world — apartment homes, workers' dwellings, homes above factories, and even plans for conveniently splitting up the acreage to maximize value.

Here's a plan for that:

And here's a plan for some lake barges that were, apparently available to anyone, including anybody who wanted to live #Vanlife circa 1935. They look awesome.

At the same time, the models show that the elites literally lived above everyone else — they're the topographically privileged group in the lower left corner of the model.

And of course, there were the super richies who got to enjoy life in the House on the Mesa, a mansion that was designed for rich people. 

I think there are two approaches to the weirdness of this, both of which mirror what I ended up doing in the video. The first approach is to look at it as a literal expression of Wright's personal class hierarchy, and there's some evidence for such a thing existing. As an architect, after all, he'd spent some time working for some very rich clients without being rich himself, so he probably felt pretty status aware. There's also evidence that Wright was very sympathetic to the American First movement, which was sort of the United States of Nazis. Their nativist sentiments might explain some of the "scum" that Wright hoped to prevent in his Broadacre plan. A lot of these architects seem to be in the fascist camp.

But I favor a less literal, more expressive approach like what I ended up with in the video: this Utopia is part of Wright's personal identity - he's expressing elements of himself through this model and design. That continues to the notion of class. The worker, the elite, the school leader — they all coexist within Wright and, as a result, they all show up in Broadacre City. The evidence is the model itself, beautiful but nonsensical, showing the things that will never be in the most mesmerizing ways.

Sources for the video

• Wright wrote about Broadacre City in a bunch of places and venues. I decided to combine them a bit in the video, since I think the ideas are more interesting than tracing these tiny changes and evolutions. You can find his early work on Broadacre in Architectural Record, while I think The Living City is the most complete realization of the idea — it's where many of the sketches and maps come from in the video. The Disappearing City appeared before it, but I think you can skip it. None of his writing is really my style — a bit too faux-philosophical and abstract for my taste.

• The City of Tomorrow by Le Corbusier was much more my style — it was written like a blog post, with a great history of cities, a concrete explanation of the traffic problem, and a trollish plan for the future. I actually read it online, but now that I've linked to this edition I kind of want it.

• This model was the basis for mine in the video (I then hired — very exciting! — someone to make it a bit prettier). The model has some mild differences from the plan I filmed for the video, but because Broadacre was constantly being tweaked and refined, I thought that was OK as long as the broad strokes were right.

• Here's a cool photo of FLW that I'm supposed to credit.

• Interview excerpts come from a weird and short-lived NBC TV show called "Wisdom." Wright is super old in it and I would say the conversation is a little less compelling because of the architect-speak that sneaks in. That said, it was neat to hear the exact things I'd seen in Broadacre and The Living City articulated by the man himself once again.

• Stewart's YouTube channel! Everything I said in the video was true - great resource, nice guy, great channel. I recommend the video about Wrigley Field, it was a fun recent fave for me. And I did rewrite the video after chatting with him to reflect his views and sharpen mine.

• A few academic papers were really helpful to get some basics in my head for this — usually primary sources are better, but since Wright is so high-minded in his writing, the histories were really helpful. This is the House on the Mesa paper I linked above. This one has an overview of Broadacre relative to other plans, and it was useful, but it led me a bit down the literal path that I later abandoned. Here's another Broadacre overview. This one got much closer to the realm of useful. This one gets into some politically charged topics that I didn't think were right for my video, but it's good to have stuff like this in your head even if you don't use it a lot.

• I'm giving this paper its own bullet point, a vaunted status that the author will no doubt want to commemorate with a trophy or bumper sticker on his mom's car. I basically ripped the whole car section from this — it makes a very compelling argument using a lot of evidence. It's also just kinda interesting.

• That's it, except for the newspaper articles I found about WWII bombing and Broadacre, which I think were my own find and I find very funny — Wright was totally using clickbait to get people to learn about his plan. I think I can relate...