building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

cultivate the architecture there. He had no real confidence in the settlement grid
spread by the Land Ordinances of the end of the eighteenth century, but he
understood that it was an element to which he had to relate. Edward Frank wrote
about the grid and the module: “the module was never adopted in a dogmatic
sense, namely elevated at the level of a universal system. The proportions are not
based uniquely, and not even in a prevailing manner, on abstract geometrical grids,
but on concrete and immediate relationships: ” 101 .
Therefore, Wright used Broadacre City not only to examine the nineteenth‐century
pioneer’s limit, but he also grasped the potentialities of the landscape on the vast
scale of the U.S. section, which continues to be a feature of the territory today.
Broadacre ultimately represents an idea of a town and of democracy, which
summarises America itself. In particular, it makes us think of the America of the vast
fields and farms of the Midwest, governed by the Public Land Survey system, and it
symbolizes the contradictions of America, the story of which is inseparable from the
movement of the car and the elevator.
101 FRANK , Edward, Pensiero organico e architettura wrightiana, Bari, Dedalo libri, 1978, pp. 28‐29
[translation by the editor from Italian]
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