Week 32: Frank Lloyd Wright and Broadacre City
As related in an earlier column, Frank Lloyd Wright came to Chandler in 1928 to design and build a grand luxury hotel in the South Mountain foothills, which was to be called the San Marcos in the Desert. The 1929 stock market crash dashed any hope of the hotel being constructed. Ultimately, Wright and Dr. Alexander J. Chandler planned eleven different projects together, including a house for Dr. Chandler in the San Tan foothills. Only one of their projects came to fruition – a temporary camp for laborers at the Chandler Heights citrus tracts. Nonetheless, the two remained friends until Chandler’s death in 1950.
By 1935, Wright was searching for a home in Arizona for his architecture school. His wife, Olgivanna, did not care for Wisconsin. And Wright himself remembered fondly his time in Arizona designing the San Marcos in the Desert. Chandler offered up a facility known as La Hacienda to Wright and his students. It was a former polo stable for the San Marcos Hotel which had been converted into a hotel. La Hacienda was a temporary home for the Taliesin school until they could find a more permanent location. La Hacienda was an ideal location for Wright’s school, as there was plenty of space and an outdoor courtyard where Wright’s students could do their work.
Cornelia Brierly, one of Wright’s students who made the cross country trek from Wisconsin to Chandler, wrote an autobiography about her experiences. The town of Chandler, it seemed, did not make a good impression on her. She wrote “Chandler was a cattle town with stockyards. A section of little shacks and dusty yards…Dr. Chandler owned the town’s San Marcos Resort Hotel inhabited mostly by people in wheelchairs with ear trumpets, or so it seemed to us.”
The work they were doing at La Hacienda was developing the model of Broadacre City, Wright’s vision of the ideal suburban community. In Broadacre City, each family was given an acre of their own to grow crops for their own subsistence. Urbanization and mass transit were minimized, and the automobile was emphasized. The City had a large grid of arterial streets and highways which connected commercial development zones.
The model that Wright and his students developed during their time at La Hacienda was a 12 foot by 12 foot scale model that represented four square miles of the community. The model was transported, somewhat ironically, to New York City for display in an Industrial Arts Exposition at Rockefeller Center. The New York Times estimated that 40,000 people saw the model during the expo. Afterwards, it toured the country and was viewed in several other cities.
Wright’s plans for Broadacre City were never completed. He tinkered with the concept right up until his death in 1959. Some have suggested that the concept was realized in modern day suburban sprawl, though that view seems to overlook the subsistence farming element of Wright’s plan. The physical model itself went into deep storage. In 2014, conservators at the Museum of Modern Art in New York dusted off the model, repaired some of the structures, and made it the center of an exhibit about Wright’s works.