Frank Lloyd Wrights Marin County Civic Center

Author : Alexandra Cerise Craven
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781339064352
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (643 download)

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Download or read book Broadacre City Exposed written by Alexandra Cerise Craven and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frank Lloyd Wright's last building project, the Marin County Civic Center (1957-1969), closely manifests Wright's Usonian vision, Broadacre City. Wright promoted Broadacre City for the last thirty years of his career in an attempt to decentralize the American city. Current scholarship argues that Broadacre City never came to fruition. The purpose of my research through my analysis of personal letters, transcripts, interviews, autobiographies, and newspaper articles detailing the planning and construction of the Marin County Civic Center is to show that Broadacre City nearly was built. Wright's Usonian vision would have redistributed land throughout the United States so that each family would own a one-acre parcel of land, and instead of cities (which Wright believed were ruining the nation by greed and filth) there would be zones with centralized functions in a rural landscape. These functions included government, education, industry, entertainment, and housing. Since the late-nineteenth century, Wright had been influenced by Jeffersonian idealism. Jeffersonian idealism encapsulated patriotism, civic virtue, and morality through owning and working the land. Through this, the moral and organic character of the citizenry would develop. Wright's Jeffersonianism in the 1930s and post-war context aligned with then current theories of utopian socialism, which allowed for land ownership, capital, and industry in conjunction with everyone having an equal opportunity. Wright visited and spoke in the USSR in 1937, and twenty years later, in 1957, while speaking at the planning hearing in Marin County for the proposed Civic Center, was accused of being a Communist. My thesis works to clarify Wright's planning philosophy as revealed in the Marin County Civic Center. Although Frank Lloyd Wright did not propose to redistribute ownership of land across Marin County, the Civic Center does closely approximate the centralized governing structures proposed in Broadacre City. In doing so --particularly through the ways Wright arranged different functions in close proximity to each other to promote civic mindedness just through using its services--he created a new and especially democratic Civic Center typology.