Broadacre City
Wright built a twelve-foot model of a decentralized America, but no single place ever became Broadacre City.
Quick facts
- Existence state
- Never Born
- Peak stage
- officially announced
- Research confidence
- high
- Last verified
What it was
Frank Lloyd Wright's long-running proposal for a low-density, automobile-connected settlement organized around individual land ownership.
Broadacre City distributed homes, farms, workplaces and civic structures across a vast landscape, with one acre imagined for each family. Wright and his apprentices built a detailed public model and continued refining the system for decades, but it was a national social vision rather than one commissioned development.
Existence timeline
Wright outlines a decentralized social order in The Disappearing City.
Taliesin apprentices construct the large Broadacre model.
Tens of thousands view the proposal at Rockefeller Center.
Wright continues developing Broadacre near the end of his life.
Wright and his apprentices translate the decentralized-city concept into a large physical model.
Why it ended
No municipality implemented the complete scheme. Elements resembled later suburbia, but Broadacre as a coherent city never existed.
Last confirmed trace
The large 1934–35 model, drawings, books and associated building models survive in the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives at MoMA and Columbia.
What it left behind
It remains a central argument about American decentralization: simultaneously prophetic about mobility and communication and troubling for its land use, exclusion and dependence on cars.
How we classified it
No generally obtainable public release existed; demonstrations, internal prototypes or archival fragments do not constitute public access to the proposed work.
The strongest verified milestone maps to officially_announced in Arrival Score V1.
Sources & verification
Last reviewed 2026-08-01. Sources are linked so readers can inspect the evidence directly.