March 26, 2014:  Urban Survival and Suburban Flight (1960 – 1966)

Previously on Beneath the Waves American consumers with purchasing power were also on the move. With the advent of the automobile the demand for single-family homes increased.  Americans migrated from inner city neigbhorhoods to vast suburbs. The utopian ideals of a place outside the crowded and urban centers are not new only to the 20th century.  However the modernist architect LeCorbusier in a 1925 exhibit aponsored by an automobile manufacturer, in 1925 -- he proposed to bulldoze most of central Paris France  and build an orthogonal street grid and park-like green space.  Later, in the 1930s, Le Corbusier published in La Ville radieuse (The Radiant City) -- he abandoned class-based stratification -- housing was according to family size, not economic position. As a modernist Le Corbusier  dreamed of "cleaning and purging" the city, bringing "a calm and powerful architecture"—referring to steel, plate glass, and reinforced concrete. Although Le Corbusier's designs to rebuild Stockholm, a city he considered as having beautiful buildings in monotony, did not succeed, later secondary architects took his ideas and partly "destroyed" the city according to a review.

Here in the USA -- Broadacre City, an urban or suburban development concept proposed by Frank Lloyd Wright, was an idea in his 1932 book The Disappearing City.  It was initially displayed at an Industrial Arts Exposition in the Forum at the Rockefeller Center starting on April 15, 1935. A model pf Broadacre was displayed in a Pittsburgh Federal Housing Administration exposition titled "New Homes for Old".

Broadacre City was the antithesis of a city a Wright's vision of the newly born suburbia -- It was both a planning statement and a socio-political scheme by which each U.S. family would be given a one acre (4,000 m²) plot of land from the federal lands reserves -- Wright-conceived a community would be built anew and an exact opposite of transit-oriented development.  All important transport is done by automobile and the pedestrian can exist safely only within the confines of the one acre plots.