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MCKIM, MEAD & WHITE, ARCHITECTS

1883-86.⁴⁵ Organized by local businessmen and New York restaurateur Louis Sherry, this was to compete with Newport for the less wealthy, and this more relaxed informal clientele may have encouraged the development of the rambling, irregular Z-plan extending from the beach road out toward the sea [71, 72]. Its irregular skyline, and seemingly *ad hoc* plan arrangement with its colliding rooms, represents the firm at its most picturesque, but in this instance the partner in charge was McKim, not White. Again inspiration came from the

69. Charles J. Osborn house, Mamaroneck, N. Y., 1883-85. G. W. Sheldon, *Artistic Country Seats*.

70. Osborn house, plan. *Monograph.*

Cloverleaf project, unit plans.

Cloverleaf project, perspective.

Suntop presents an interesting prototype for multifamily dwellings in a sub-urban setting. Only one of the projected four buildings at Ardmore was constructed, however, and the idea has inherent difficulties. First, Wright apparently did not see the space-saving advantage of combining utilities and parking areas: each of the four units has its own heating system and a private garage. Second, in the equal quadrant or pinwheel plan every building has to be approached from four sides and is surrounded by streets that have to be crossed to get elsewhere. As a result, in the Cloverleaf development, a high percentage of the total area is paved to provide access. Another problem with the pinwheel notion is that each building is separate and isolated and cannot be combined with others in any convenient way. There is no economy of multiplication. The site plans are therefore typically unhierarchical: they are made up simply of equally spaced, identical buildings.

Copyright © The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, 1962

b

# Broadacre City

## Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Project, 1935

Broadacre City is the apotheosis of the American suburban ideal at a vast scale adjusted to the motor car. It was Wright's answer to the problem of the urban crisis, 'a dream of a new settlement spread out across the landscape in a way that can only be called suburban, although it was socially visionary in a way that contradicts our suburban models.... It was a naive dream, in one sense, based on the assumption that the right (or Wright) architecture would assure the good life for all; yet it was inordinately sophisticated at the same time.¹ It must also be seen, as Vincent Scully has suggested, as Wright's answer to Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse proposal of 1922-25.² Not a city but an anti-city - 'let the auto take the city to the country', Wright wrote somewhat cryptically - Broadacre City, like a suburb, is an attempt to establish an urban conurbation using landscape techniques. While it is difficult to assess to what extent

Broadacre City's planning ideals influenced the development of the automobile suburbs of the post-World War II era, it is evident that Wright, far more than Clarence Stein or Henry Wright, clearly saw the planning potential of the automobile. Wright's plan is organised along a broad arterial highway with as many as 12 lanes and an elevated monorail. Supermarkets and hotels are situated along the highway, while small factories of the artisan type (often with dwellings upstairs) are set just beyond. The school is the focus of the various dwelling clusters, while a county centre and recreational facilities are related to natural features. Farms and factories are at the fringes of development and the proposal is climaxed by an 'automobile objective', a spiral ramp leading to an overlook atop a hill from which the entire region can be observed. Wright's grasp of highway engineering was prophetic; Norman Bel Geddes would use many of the same

ideas in his Magic Motorways project for the 1939 World's Fair.

The direct impact on the suburb of Wright's planning is difficult to document, but the influence of his architectural ideas is clear. The house types he devised for Broadacre City, with their nomenclature usually derived from the number of cars parked under their broad carports, greatly influenced the form of the ubiquitous post-World War II ranch house. The modest 'one-car' dwelling, with its low hipped roofs, broad chimney, open interior plan and inclusion of workshop facilities, has surely become a constituent American type.

### Notes

1. Paul Goldberger, 'He Had an Answer for Everything', *New York Times Book Review*, June 19 1977, pp 4–5.

2. Vincent J Scully, Jr., 'FLW and the International Style, Broadacre City', *American Architect* 146, May 1935, pp 55–62.

Frank Lloyd Wright, dwelling clusters

86

a Certosa di Ema, plan. Florence, fourteenth century.

b Certosa di Ema, individual monk's quarters, plan.

c Immeuble Villas, unit plans.

d Immeuble Villas, axonometric.

a

b

c

# Immeuble Villas

PARIS, 1922-1929

## Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier credits the development of the Immeuble Villas unit, actually built as a prototype in the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau in the Paris International Exposition of 1925, to his observations of the Carthusian monastery near Florence, the Certosa di Firenze or Certosa di Ema. The monks' quarters there consist of small walled-in houses arranged around a cloister. Each house is two stories high and opens to an enclosed L-shaped garden. The Corbusian version of this arrangement uses a form of the same approximate dimensions—roughly square and two stories high. However, the house has been extended to include the small porches, so that it is now an L-shaped solid and the garden a cubic void. Access is from a corridor on the courtyard side of the building, an arrangement approximating the cloister loggia of the monastery. Even with these changes, however, the division of the square is the same: the dimensions are almost exactly alike and both are two stories high. The overall building configuration is also similar: identical units arranged around the periphery of a courtyard with communal functions located elsewhere—on the roof of the Immeuble and near the church in the monastery.

The Immeuble Villas (Le Corbusier's term for an apartment building composed of multistory villas) were never built aside from the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau, but the basic notion of an L-shaped solid arranged around a cubic

d