Part 4 | Masterplanning the Future of Cities

Utopian Rendering of Broadacres City with the Mile High included

Utopian Rendering of Broadacres City with the Mile High included

Part 4 of 4 | Wright the Urban Planner

 

How would a towering skyscraper, holding a hundred thousand people create a sense of freedom and space? The answer is in the context. Working on radical new ideas for the urbanization of the new American landscape, Wright was reordering the existing urban and rural divide into one harmonious living city.

Entitled “Broadacre City,” and devised over decades, this model for a new city was the foundation of the Wright traveling exhibition. Broadacre featured buildings designed to serve nine distinct social functions: communal work, commerce, worship, learning, arts, recreation, community services, individual dwelling, and communal dwelling. 

Sometime between 1951 when the traveling exhibition started, and that fateful night in 1956, with a few strokes of his pencil, the masterplan for Broadacre City had a monolithic tower extending a mile out from the pristine landscape. "This is The Illinois, gentlemen," Wright told the assembled reporters, "in it, will be consolidated all government offices now scattered around Chicago." The extreme centralization was not an observance of the skyscraper, the skyscraper was to make space in the city. 

Wright understood, maybe more deeply than many, that variety was absolutely necessary for the sustained happiness of people. Valuing spacial and program diversity was present in every building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. From the prairie houses with their open living areas, grand entertainment rooms, dedicated food prep areas, interior and exterior gardens and so forth, to the design of commercial buildings and offices where he insisted on naturally lit, open, organic spaces, for the wellbeing of workers, along with social programming and the sorts.

 

“If we’re going to have centralization, why not quit fooling around and have it,” he said later adding "Why not design a building that really is tall?

Wright was ahead of his time not only in technological solutions to tall buildings, but also as an early adopter of live-work spaces. Rather than trying to make skyscrapers monotonous repetitions of floor plans, Wright devised ways in making towers less dense and, in his mind, less unbearable. This is best exemplified in the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

 
 

Commissioned by Harold Price, the towers program was conceived as the corporate headquarters for his Bartlesville oil pipeline and chemical firm. The HC Price Company would be the primary tenant occupying the top two floors of the tower, while the remaining offices and apartments would become a source of revenue for the company. 

The Illinois - Mile High - Wright Floor Plan.jpeg

“If we’re going to have centralization, why not quit fooling around and have it,” he reportedly said later adding "Why not design a building that really is tall? ... Long ago I observed trees after the passing of a cyclone. Those with deep taproots were the ones that survived." The ‘Taproot’ structural model he was referring to worked by sinking a central concrete mast deep into the ground and cantilevering floors from the mast like branches of a tree. In contrast to a typical skyscraper, in which same-size floors are stacked atop of one another using a heavy rigid steel frame or load bearing walls, Wright planned a core that ran up the centre of the entire structure that housed the building’s infrastructure. Best demonstrated by the Johnson Research Tower where the taproot system let floors vary in size, opening a the towers interior and letting space flow between floors. 

Wright along with building committee devised a way for the project to be a multi-use building with business offices, shops, and even apartments. The Price Company occupied the upper floors, and included a commissary on the sixteenth floor as well as a penthouse office suite for Harold Price, Sr., and later his son, Harold, Jr.

There are 2 square elevator lobbies separated by the structural spine, each containing 21 elevators, 5 stories each, so one would have to determine which floor to enter the elevator in order to end up at the desired exit floor. As the building rises, and the floors decrease in area, the square elevator lobbies eventually penetrate the exterior, and the elevators diminish in number.

However the Johnson Research Tower is only 14 storeys tall with relatively small floor plates, a single elevator and no emergency escape. Contrastingly The Illinois would be 12.3 million square feet (1.14 km2) spread out over 528 floors of offices, restaurants, helipads, parking garages and so on radiating out from the central core. While critics like Bill Baker said Wright’s taproot structural system  wouldn’t have worked, (interview with IBM.https://www.ibm.com/blogs/industries/frank-lloyd-wright-got-future-cities-wrong/)

Others have done the math suggesting Wright severely underestimated the number of elevators needed.


“The taller you go, the more elevators you need. But “people don’t want to be waiting forever,” said Vishaan Chakrabarti, architect and Columbia University professor. “Suddenly you’re building a tower of elevators. At some point, it stops making sense.” NEEDS 200 ELEVATORS

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/21/up-and-then-down

The proposal for the mile-high Illinois was not a building that stands alone. It was the centrepiece of a Wrights grand urban plan.

Credits & Sources

  1. The Wright Library. Sixty Years of Living Architecture: The Work of Frank Lloyd Wright (1951-1956). http://www.steinerag.com/flw/Books/sixty.htm#1956Insert

  2. The Tree That Escaped The Forest. By Frank Lloyd Wright. Published by Horizon Press, N. Y., 1956. https://www.abebooks.com/

  3. The Capital Times. Page 1. Tuesday October 16th, 1956.

  4. Daily World. Page 26. September 21st, 1956.

  5. MOMA. Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive. Jun 12–Oct 1, 2017 https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1660

  6. Milestones and Memoranda on the Work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Vol. 32, No. 4 (Nov., 1956), pp. 361-368

  7. Sixty years of living architecture : the work of Frank Lloyd Wright by Wright, Frank Lloyd, 1867-1959. https://archive.org/details/sixtyyear00wrig/mode/2up

  8. Building Seagram. by Phyllis Lambert.

  9. Architecture: Close Reading; Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mile-High Rise. By Philip Nobel. Oct. 17, 2004. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/arts/architecture-close-reading-frank-lloyd-wrights-milehigh-rise.html

 
Joshua Nelson