In Cloquet, Minnesota—a town of around 12,000, just west of Duluth and the tip of Lake Superior, which points downward with a long, hand-of-God-like finger—there is the only functioning Frank Lloyd Wright–designed gas station. Built in 1958, the Cloquet gas station has the proportions and presence of a small chapel; it looks like a place of worship, like whatever one consumes there might be the product of transubstantiation. Nowadays, it’s a little worse for wear: some shingles on the roof are discolored; metal elements have warped and corroded; the paint colors, always subtle in Wright’s designs, have been sapped of any life force. It was once not only in better shape, but actually model shape, serving as the first full-scale, physical proof of Wright’s utopian vision for the Midwest: “Broadacre City.” According to Wright’s plans, Broadacre City would come to replace the typical urban center, which the architect saw as an objectionable and disgusting amalgamation of people, buildings, and chaos. The new vision of optimal urban planning would unfurl a nearly sterile network of one- and three-acre homesteads, connected by highways that would facilitate vehicular travel by individuals across all components of the metropolis. Wright’s taxonomy of urban elements, documented in drawings for Broadacre City, reads like what a child might come up with while populating a plastic play-town: little farms, games, races, medium houses, schools, vineyards and orchards, arena, arts, arboretum, aquarium, airport, larger houses, small industry, tourist camp, community church, minimum houses, county seat, recreation, university, zoo, clinics, market, lake.
At best, plans for Broadacre City were schematic and Wright’s arguments for it specious. His writings on the topic, compiled in a 1945 book, When Democracy Builds, reveal just how megalomaniacal his visions were and how narrow a conception he had of basic ideas like freedom, democracy, and even personhood. The twelve-by-twelve-foot model his apprentices made of the grand image for Broadacre City could be a set for a Wes Anderson film: the priority seemed to be not whether buildings or spaces functioned well for living and working people, but only that they were neatly and pleasantly arranged, like abstractions within a given territory. Everything is placed at right angles to each other, housed within perfectly orthogonal containers; there is no room for disorder or spontaneity or unpredictability. Wright didn’t want to be close to labor, or ugly things, or things that might bother with their smell or sound or sight, never mind things that might make someone question the status quo.
Broadacre City, in fact, would not be a city at all, but rather an infinite quilt of individuals interwoven with the land to which they were attached; the land from which they would ostensibly work and feed themselves. The blanket would spread horizontally—this was Wright’s preferred direction, as we know from all of those houses with long planes that cut across the landscape, and also from the Guggenheim: one of the few buildings of more than two stories Wright ever designed, which makes vertical movement almost imperceptible by spreading it out across a visitor’s entire, horizontal journey around the museum’s atrium. In Broadacre City, right-angled modules with their little farms, games, races, and medium houses would fit together in a middle-American tapestry of near-nothingness, which Wright hoped would solve the problems that plagued “capitalistic”society. (For Wright, the issue was not the extractive nature of capitalism, but rather the “greedy” excesses of its execution.) The modules in Wright’s design would make it possible for Broadacre City to embody the central tenets of the Usonian philosophy—Usonia being the word Wright used for “America,” except better, more perfect, more equal and democratic, and thanks to what we know from the work of Mabel O. Wilson, likely without any people who weren’t white. The document upon which it would be founded reads in part:
No institutes
No petty officialism
No Landlord—No Tenant
No politicians—No academicians
No traffic problem
No back and forth haul
No poles—no wires in sight
No ditches alongside the roads
No headlights—No visible lamps
No policemen
No minor axis—No major axis
No yards for raw materials
No smoke—No hardrails
No radio or billboard advertising
No slum—No scum
What would Broadacre City have really looked like, one wonders, with its tiny, one-crop farms, its university next door to its zoo and aquarium, its rows of vineyards and orchards sandwiched between small industry and industry, the trees breathing in all that smoke and soot. What would come of the life of the Usonians?
People would most likely be arranged into sets of two adults, one of each of the only two genders that existed when Wright was drawing up these plans, and two children, idem. (This is hard to glean exactly from Wright’s writings, since it is always men with whom he is concerned—not even men, women, and children, not even in that order. Just men.) Children in Broadacre City have a school to go to, but they can’t walk there, meaning someone (mother, most likely) is there to act as chauffeuse between tilling the fields and harvesting the vegetables and cooking three meals a day, each served at the table at a specified time, while Dad is off doing whatever he does, maybe teaching at the university or working in “small industry” or chatting with other men fueling up at the gas station.
The gas station, after all, is the linchpin of Broadacre society: a center for socialization, communion, and exchange. It is the heart of the Broadacre community. Citizens, in the brief few minutes that they spend waiting for their gas tanks to reach fullness and the gas attendants to ring them up for however many cents gas cost in 1939 (19 a gallon) hold conversations about society and democracy. They are unencumbered by the formalities of politics or academics, informed only by their experience on their homestead and their occasional run-in with another person at the gas station or, if it counts, on the road. They come up with solutions to the problems of their already pretty perfect society, solutions they have no way of applying, and then go on their merry way. Broadacre denizens, by design, are propelled ever outward, away from each other as well as from themselves, only toward the horizon.
Wright’s architectural vision was a manifest destiny of the self, a frontier for every household, a westward expansion outside every door. With the exception of “no policemen,” his wish for American life more or less came true all over this country. The Midwest was one of maybe two places, the other being the desert, where Wright felt okay living, because they allowed him to put vast distances between himself and other people. (The two houses where he spent most of his time, Taliesin North and Taliesin West are located in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and Scottsdale, Arizona, respectively.) It’s not a stretch to say his Utopian vision emerges from his deeply antisocial urges. Wright thought that the Midwest’s existing features could be rearranged like pieces on a checkerboard, the fabric of loneliness and individuation spreading over cliffs, valleys, rivers, and woods indiscriminately, until it covered everything—which tells me he was both a misanthrope and a philistine, the only two words I can think of to describe someone whose Utopia is a blank page that primarily facilitates the avoidance of a chance encounter.
Of course, Broadacre City is not the only example of Wright’s misanthropy. It’s in every one of his designs. The houses he designed in the Usonian style, all over the Midwest and in a planned development called “Usonia in Mount Pleasant” in Westchester County, evidence a deep desire for isolation and a denial of the need for other people, socialization, and the ounce of chance that simply going about one’s day might yield something unexpected. Wright’s Usonian houses are isolated and often desolate; there’s no way to reach them without a car yet they seldom provide a garage; they are located too far away from any town center to walk to them but provide little to no storage for dry goods or supplies or pantry items or anything else one might need if one can’t get to the store every other day; and they are inward-facing, their spaces tight and so low-ceilinged that they make you feel like you’re about to fold into yourself.
I wonder what Wright would make of suburbia and if the current state of most of the American built landscape would satisfy him. If it would be clear enough of slums, of traffic problems, of people who need to rent in order to have a roof over their heads, of the unsightly elements—raw materials, labor, time not spent in a manner of one’s own choosing—necessary to run society.
I wonder, too, what he would make of how his buildings, left to the whims of the market, are being kept. There’s the Cloquet gas station, of course, that shrine to petroleum and the automobile, to man’s ability to move unencumbered, without a single thought of his neighbors or the landscape which housed him. It was bought in 2018 by record manufacturer and entrepreneur Andrew Volna, who said in a 2023 interview in which he looks at the original drawings of the building for the first time: “I like sitting around just thinking about it or knowing that I own it.” There are dozens of houses, too; many of them, passed down one generation to an inheritor who had no interest in tending to a house ideally designed for J.D. Salinger or Ted Kaczynski, have ended up in the care of public parks and universities, a state of affairs to which Wright would surely object were he still alive. Some have been demolished. In Chicago, a unit in the 1895 Waller apartments was for sale in as-is condition for the better part of 2023; it was listed by Christie’s at $75,000 in the hopes that “an experienced professional with cash and city development experience” would buy it and renovate it. This unit has been on and off the market for more than twenty years; it won’t sell because it’s not in great shape and because its landmarked status demands special renovation considerations, meaning that it’s more likely to sit empty and dilapidated for years than to find an owner who will take responsibility for it and what it might represent. Despite its architectural relevance, Wright’s work is so rooted in his fanatical worship of the individual that it might end up falling into oblivion within a few generations. In practice as in theory, it’s every man and every building for himself, forever and ever. Amen.
Marianela D’Aprile
Marianela D’Aprile is a writer living and working in New York City. Her work has been published in n+1, The Nation, and Jacobin, among others. She is the deputy editor of the New York Review of Architecture.