BOOKS
ARCHITECT'S UTOPIA
ARCHITECTURE AND MODERN LIFE.
By Baker Brownell and
Frank Lloyd Wright. Harper
&
Bros. $4.00.
Frank Lloyd Wright believes that only "organic architecture" or
primitive Christianity-"Jesus,
the gentle anarchist"-can solve the crisis.
This was also the theme of his earlier book,
The Disappearing City,
writ-
ten in the depths of the depression. If we forget the undergraduate
poetizing of the great architect, now seventy years old ("the earth is
prostrate, prostitute to the sun"), and his no less profound philosophizing
("what, then, is life?"), and if we strip his argument of the grand, neo-
Biblical and neo-Whitmanesque theogonic jargon of "integral," "organic"
and the man "individual," we come at last to a familiar doctrine of
innocence and original sin and a plan of redemption by rural housing.
According to Wright (and this is developed in detail by Brownell) a
primitive state of democratic individualism in the Eden of the small
towns and the farms was perverted by the cities. A privileged class arose
which did not know how to administer its wealth in the common interest;
and what remained of the native culture was corrupted by the immi-
grants. But by an internal law that regulates the fortunes of mankind,
swinging life back to its healthy starting-point when it has gone too far
toward decay, salvation comes through the evil itself. As the city grows,
it is choked by its own traffic and reawakens the nomadic instincts of
man. Its own requirements of efficiency gradually bring about decentral-
ization. And the insecurity of life in the city forces people back to the
soil where their living depends on themselves alone and a healthy indi-
vidualism can thrive. In the Broadacrc City, already designed by Wright
in his earlier book, the urban refugee will have his acre of ground on
which to grow some vegetables; he will work several days a week in a
factory some miles away, accessible in his second-hand Ford; the cash
income will supplement the garden; and through these combined labors
he will enjoy a balanced life in nature. The new integrity of the indi-
vidual will bring about the end of speculation and commercial standards.
The deurbanizing of life, the fusion of city and country on a high
productive level, is an ideal shared by socialists and anarchists. But when
presented as in Wright's books as an immediate solution of the crisis, it
takes on another sense. It is the plan of Ford and Swope, a scheme of
permanent subsistence farming with a corvee of worksharing in the
distant mill, of scattered national company villages under a reduced
living standard. The homes of Broarlacrc City may be of the most recent
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