Frank Lloyd Wright has simultaneous reputations as perhaps
the greatest architect the USA has ever produced and simultaneously its worst
ever urban designer. American suburbia is often thought to be built at a
density of about eight dwellings per acre. This can increase to about 20 acres
per acre if a terraced-house (or row-house) typology is used. Frank Lloyd
Wright, in his landmark urban design statement, Broadacre City, proposed that
density should actually be set at one dwelling per acre. The disastrous effect
this would have on walkable distances, mixture of uses and reduced car
dependency can be imagined.
Imagine my surprise, therefore when I came across these
buildings in Milwaukee, on my second visit to the USA. A cluster of Frank Lloyd
Wright buildings built in close proximity, a street no less.
These buildings were commissioned in 1911 by Arthur
Richards, a Milwaukee real estate developer, who developed, with Wright, an
approach to housing known as the American System-Built Houses. The idea was to
create housing off-site, prefabricated in factories, using timber-frame
techniques, working to a two foot module. The house kit-of-parts could be
delivered anywhere in the USA via
railroad. In reality, for various reasons, only twenty such homes were
ever built.
As an urbanist, Frank Lloyd Wright has been much mocked over
the years. By way of a corollary, the
American academic Neil Levine has pointed out that Wright produced excellent designs
for difficult very urban sites in cities as diverse as Pittsburgh, Washington
DC, Madison and Baghdad.
Still, who would have thought that Wright was capable of
producing an urban design proposal as dense and sustainable as “the Street”?
