"How [do we] live in America, together?" This is the question that the upcoming exhibit, "Living in America: Frank Lloyd Wright, Harlem, and Modern Housing" at Columbia University's Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery in New York seeks to answer. Opening on Sept. 9, the show features more than 24 housing development projects from across the country, but highlights contrasting approaches exemplified by Frank Lloyd Wright's unrealized 1935 Broadacre City exurban city development proposal, and New York City's first public housing development, the Harlem River Houses constructed in 1936. In a correlating narrative featuring drawings, photographs, models, and project materials from the late-1920s through the late-1950s, the show addresses housing during the Great Depression, "[telling] a story of segregation, inequality, and aspiration—a story as old as the country itself," according to the exhibit description.
Wright's Broadacre City was first published in his book "The Disappearing City" (William Farquhar Payson, 1932) in 1932. While his plans were never implemented, they illustrated a utopian development consisting of exurban single family houses, where "each family would get an acre of land," according to Morgan Meis' article for the New Yorker. "Residential areas would be spaced out between areas for commerce, industry, parkland, and agriculture," Meis writes. "Everything would be connected by a complex design of streets and highways."
Three years after introducing this concept for the first time, Wright exhibited a 12-foot-by-12-foot model of Broadacre City at New York's Rockefeller Center. A manifesto engraved on two wooden panels accompanied the model and displayed the phrase "Living in America"—which lends itself to the exhibition's title—evidence that the issue of living together has been a discussion since the 1950s in the U.S. Nevertheless, Wright's idealistic vision was partly criticized for overlooking racial and economic diversity, as also noted on the press release, "Broadacre's residents were, for the most part, implicitly white."
During the same period, the Harlem River Houses that mainly targeted working-class African-Americans broke ground and was completed within a year in the historically African-American neighborhood of Harlem in northern Manhattan. Designed by a team of architects including John Louis Wilson—the first African-American student to graduate from Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation—the project was completed by the Public Works Administration under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, making it the city's first public housing project paid for with federal funds. Higher living standards such as safe courtyards, playgrounds, indoor modern amenities, electricity, heating system, natural light, and private bathrooms made the Harlem River Houses distinct from other housing complexes in the city. "In a time of significant racial inequality, the complex stood out as one of the best constructed examples of public housing and a highly desirable place to live for the African-American community," according to writer Meghan White for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Taking a closer look at each approach reveals conflicts of social and racial inclusion and economic diversity within those projects, and speaks to the housing trends of that era. However, according to the gallery's press release, they both "acknowledge ... the right to housing, that is actively forgotten in America today."
"This is a living history, in every possible sense," says Reinhold Martin, director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University. "The difficult questions about American society that are raised by these buildings, projects, and ideas are as relevant today as they were then."
"Living in America: Frank Lloyd Wright, Harlem, and Modern Housing" is on view until Dec. 17 and is presented in conjunction with MoMA’s current exhibition "Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive." An opening reception will take place this Friday, Sept. 8, at the same location.
