Associated Professor Dr.

Magda Teodorescu

Student:Budulan Ana Georgiana 25B

Frank Lloyd Wright's urban proposal vs. Garden City proposal

Ebenezer Howards Garden City of Tomorrow is one of the most widely used method of
urban planning today because it represented an alternative to an alternative to overcrowded and
industrial cities, along with greater sustainability. In the following essay I will firstly try to
broadly explain the principles of both Ebenezers Garden City and Frank Lloyd Wrights
Broadacre City, and secondly I will tell why I think that Garden City is a slightly better
alternative.

To begin with, I would like to make you visualize The Garden City. It was meant to
be a planned city on a concentric plan with large open spaces, public parks and six
radial boulevards. In the centre of this proposal was to be the Central City, described by
Ebenezer Howard as a beautiful and well- watered garden; and, surrounding this garden,
each standing in its own ample grounds, are the larger public buildings--town hall, principal
concert and lecture hall, theatre, library, museum, picture-gallery, and hospital1. Howard
envisioned the city as a limited, self-sufficient community, and whenever the city reached the
population of 32.000, another city would be built nearby. This solution came as a response to
the questions he raised himself: How shall it grow? How shall it provide for the needs of
others who will be attracted by its numerous advantages? Shall it build on the zone of
agricultural land which is around it, and thus for ever destroy its right to be called a 'Garden
City'?2.

Howard envisioned a cluster of several garden cities as satellite towns linked by a

network of roads and rails for the purpose of quick communication. This communication
system was divided into several levels, including a inter-municipal railway that connected the
satellite garden suburbs in such a way that it would have required only about twelve minutes
to cover a distance of only ten miles from a cluster to the most distant one. Given the fact that
the trains would not stop between towns, a separate network of electric tramways would
serve this purpose. Also, the distance from any town to the heart of the central city would be
covered in approximately five minutes. This ideal communication-Transportation system was
the alternative to the railway chaos of a big city, as he calls it : Those who have had
experience of the difficulty of getting from one suburb of London to another will see in a
moment what an enormous advantage those who dwell in such a group of cities as here
shown would enjoy, because they would have a railway system and not a railway chaos to
serve their ends 3

Now, lets talk about Frank Lloyd Wrights proposal for the ideal city, consisting in
the Broadacre City urban plan. He sometimes favoured urban density. Other times he

1
Ebenezer Howard , To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform , Swan Sonnenschein & Co.,1898
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
dreamed a suburban or rural fantasy4 Morgan Meis says. I think that the term rural fantasy
describes best the Broadacre City. Just like the Garden City, the main purpose of Broadacre
City was to leave behind the overcrowded and suffocated big city. He published his
manifesto for his ideal city in an article for Architectural Record in 1935, explaining its
principles: The basis of the whole is general decentralization as an applied principle and
architectural reintegration of all units into one fabric; free use of the ground held only by use
and improvements; public utilities and government itself owned by the people of Broadacre
City; privacy on ones own ground for all and fair means of subsistence for all by way of
their own work, on their own ground and in their own laboratory, or in common offices
serving the life of the whole5

I personally see the Garden City as an healthy, natural an sustainable socio-

economical model that ,in its various applications has helped the modern urbanism. Another
positive characteristic of the garden city that I also admire is the one that Kenneth Frampton
highlights: an economically self-sufficient mutual aid community, producing little beyond
its own needs. However, it does have some disadvantages: According to A. Trystan
Edwards, Garden cities lead to desecration of the country side by trying to recreate country
side houses that could spread themselves. In comparison to the Garden City urban model, it
seems to me that The Broadacre City looks more like an anti-urban model. It looks so broad
,it extends so much that it barely looks like a city anymore. Also, as Kenneth Frampton states,
it is one of the irony of our century that Broadacre City corresponded more closely than any
other form of radical urbanism to the central percepts of the Communist Manifesto of 1848,
advocating << the gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more
equable distribution of the population over the land.

4
Morgan Meis ,Frank Lloyd Wright tried to solve the city ,The New Yorker, 2014
5
Frank Lloyd Wright, Broadacre City ,Architectural Record vol. 7 ,1935