Joseph M. Watson —

In 1925 Frank Lloyd Wright introduced a neologism to readers of the Dutch journal Wendingen. This new term—Usonian—would soon become synonymous with Wright’s late-career architecture and the socio-spatial regime he envisioned to encompass those works. He casually inserted his coinage into an essay titled “In the Cause of Architecture: The Third Dimension,” which revisited the thesis of his 1901 “The Art and Craft of the Machine” to argue that if the Machine (always, for Wright, with a capital M) could be properly domesticated, it would become a means for overcoming the dehumanizing tendencies of industrialism and the stultifying effects of stylistic revivalism. After characterizing the Renaissance as a misguided project akin to aesthetic miscegenation—“a mongrel admixture of all the styles of the world”—Wright offered a prediction: “Here in the United States may be seen the final Usonian degradation of that ideal—ripening by means of the Machine for destruction by the Machine.”¹ Without explicitly defining his novel modifier, Wright nevertheless elliptically clarified Usonian’s signification. If American artists and architects eschewed their misguided fascination with “European backwash,” he explained to a Western European readership, they would emerge as natural leaders of a Machine Age revolution because “America is a state of mind not confined to this continent—but awakening over the whole civilized world.”² Wright’s readers might therefore infer that Usonian signified a transformative potential inherent in but not confined to the United States.

The next time the term surfaced in Wright’s writing, its connotations were clearer but conceptually circumscribed. As Wright continued to explore the machine’s socio-aesthetic potential, he penned a 1927 article for Architectural Record, again called “In the Cause of Architecture,” but this time subtitled “The Architect and the Machine.” In the middle of the text, he briefly interrupted himself: “America (or let us say Usonia—meaning the United States—because Canada and Brazil are America too)—Usonia is committed to the Machine and is Machine-made to a terrifying degree.”³ If Usonian in its original adjectival form signaled an aspirational state of mind tinged with Progressive Era cultural imperialism, as a noun it seemed to become a conciliatory territorial colloquialism. Wright would subsequently misattribute the etymological origins of Usonia to Samuel Butler’s utopian satire Erewhon: Or, Over the Range (1872).⁴ As countless critics have discovered, there is no mention of Usonia in Butler’s novel. From its inception, Usonia was fraught with conceptual, semantic, and attributional misalignments.

Usonia’s ambiguous import is best displayed in The Disappearing City (1932), a book-length explication of Wright’s project for radical decentralization, Broadacre City. In it, the architect bemoaned “the rural youth of Usonia [who] longed for the activity, the sophistication and prizes of the City.” “Centralization, by way of the Usonian city,” he warned, “is not dead yet.” He condemned American architects’ interest in European modernism as superficial and “pretentious Usonian culture.” And, finally, he anticipated that, in contrast to the vertiginous centrality of the existent “Usonian city,” an authentic “modern Usonian city” would extend along “the horizontal line of Usonian freedom.” The human subject emerging from this liberating dispersion “may be a manly man, in Usonia, living in manlike freedom.”⁵ Through sometimes confusing acts of semantic elision, Wright entangled Usonia’s descriptive and projective qualities. It was the United States as it existed and as it might exist. It embodied the country’s conflicted industrial present (as instantiated in its stratified metropolises) and a more equitable future (as determined by Wright, in gendered terms).

The “urban” has always played a critical role in clarifying Usonia’s ambiguities. In most studies of Wright’s work, critics resolve the disjunction between the existent “Usonian city” and the “modern Usonian city” by counterposing Wright’s virulent anti-urbanism with his bucolic Broadacre City. Usonia, in its projective sense, would constitute an entirely new socio-spatial regime, superseding the multifarious forms of spatial and socioeconomic stratification that infected the descriptive Usonia. A recent publication by Wright scholar Neil Levine challenges this long-held understanding of Wright’s relationship to cities. In The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright, Levine argues that Wright was deeply engaged throughout his career in the fate of the American metropolis. While it does not address the idea of Usonia directly, Levine’s book does offer an opportunity to consider that broader issue anew. If Wright was, in fact, working to reform rather than abandon the modern American city, how do the fraught realities of twentieth-century urban history and the presumed equity of Usonia relate?

First, a word on Usonia itself, prior to Wright’s discovery of it. A cursory Internet search will suggest that the term was coined in a 1903 poem by one James Duff Law. In an explanatory footnote to the elegiac poem, “The Sack of Auchindore,” Law offered an anti-imperialist rationale for the appellation that prefigured Wright’s: “We of the United States, in justice to Canadians and Mexicans, have no right to use the title ‘Americans’ when referring to matters pertaining exclusively to ourselves.” He commended an earlier, unnamed writer’s coinage of Usona—an acronym for the United States of North America—but found its “assonance” to be “distasteful,” and so suggested Usonia as a “more euphonious” alternative.⁶ Law was likely referring to a July 2, 1899, St. Louis Republic article by Sylvester Waterhouse, a classics professor at Washington University, who advocated that the United States adopt the name Usona, its citizens consequently becoming Usonians. Waterhouse’s proposal received national coverage, but he did not originate the term. Sporadic incarnations of Usona can be found throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁷

The term even appeared fleetingly in architectural discourse, before Wright’s adoption of it, in a paper titled “American Methods of Erecting Buildings,” delivered at a November 1905 meeting of the Royal Institute of British Architects. The author began by “presum[ing] that by ‘American methods’ is meant the methods of the United States, or […] U.S.O.N.A.”⁸ He then defaulted to American for the remainder of the paper.

In the years surrounding World War I, as the United States became a major geopolitical actor, Usona became a standard-bearer in a nationalist cause. Advocates of the constructed language Esperanto led the charge, using derivatives of the Esperantist colloquialism Usono to distinguish the United States of (North) America from the neighboring Estados Unidos Mexicanos (another United States) and the newly formed Union of South Africa (another USA).⁹ One obscure product of this short-lived campaign was a secular cantata, “Usona: A Paean of Freedom.” The penultimate movement begins by despairing that “men, like the grain of the corn-field/Grow small in the huddled crowd” and concludes with the Wrightian exultation, “That man among men was strongest/Who stood with his feet on the earth.”¹⁰ Wright’s own Usonia fits neatly into this fragmentary genealogy. Whatever its elusive origins (Wright only ever cited Butler as his source), his version of the moniker encoded the same Progressive Era desires and anxieties. It interwove description and projection to propose an alternating interventionist and isolationist course for an ascendant United States in a changing world.

Levine’s The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright is part of a renewed effort to recontextualize Wright’s work. This effort encompasses other scholarly endeavors like Kathryn Smith’s Wright on Exhibit: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architectural Exhibitions, exhibitions such as the Museum of Modern Art’s Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive (currently on view at the time of this essay’s publication), and activity across digital platforms related to the architect’s 150th birthday in June 2017 (see also #flw150). Levine’s contribution treats a relatively understudied aspect of Wright’s career—his urban works—with a depth and nuance that challenges received understandings of the architect’s relationship to the urban realm. As noted above, Broadacre City has often dominated considerations of Wright’s attitude toward the twentieth-century city. In a brief chapter in the middle of his book, Levine recasts it as a fanciful, Depression-era distraction from a serious, career-long engagement with urban reform. While this revisionist agenda is mostly compelling, Levine does struggle to reconcile the architect’s late-career efforts to reform cities with his fixation on Broadacre City until his death in 1959. The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright otherwise offers readers detailed studies of site-specific projects, all of which were ultimately unrealized, from every decade of Wright’s seventy-year career.

Levine begins in Chicago’s suburbs in the 1890s and concludes in 1950s Baghdad. The book is organized into three parts, permitting a neat, tripartite periodization of Wright’s work into a turn-of-the-century preoccupation with Midwestern streetcar suburbs (1896–1913), a decade of experimentation with skyscrapers (ca. 1925–1935), and a sustained late-career campaign to produce an architecture attuned to the automobile’s ubiquity (1938–1957). Individual chapters focus on specific projects from each era with an impressive combination of breadth and depth. The two early chapters devoted to the Roberts Block Plan (ca. 1896, 1903–1904), to cite one example, contain detailed elaborations of the project’s multistage development, consideration of Wright’s other early domestic works within the context of suburban growth around Chicago, a survey of divergent fin-de-siècle planning traditions, an account of the grid in American planning history, and a brief excursus on the architect’s novel use of graph paper.¹¹ Levine composes these varied and detailed analyses from information embedded in Wright’s visually dense drawings, which suffuse the text, and a mountainous collection of archival and literary sources, as the copious endnotes attest. Over the course of the book’s 388 pages, a surprisingly new Frank Lloyd Wright emerges.

The strengths of the case-study format and Levine’s visual acumen are, however, betrayed at points. For example, Levine introduces a chapter on Wright’s well-known “Home in a Prairie Town” for the Ladies’ Home Journal (1901) by describing commercial, cultural, and civic activities unique to American downtowns before stating, “The suburb, by contrast, was almost exclusively residential. The center/periphery distinction became one of work versus domesticity, with the male defining the world of the downtown and the female that of the suburb.”¹² Such a characterization overlooks the more nuanced understanding of social, functional, and environmental heterogeneity that suburban historians have developed over the past several decades.¹³

This oversight undermines Levine’s ability to contextualize a project like Wright’s entry into a 1913 City Club of Chicago competition, to which Levine devotes another chapter. The competition brief asked participants to combine housing for varying income levels with civic, cultural, commercial, educational, and recreational facilities, on a site within walking distance of nearby factory jobs and eight miles from the city center. This kind of social and functional diversity was not anomalous, as Levine suggests.¹⁴ Wright himself averred that “this design introduces only minor modifications in harmony with the nature of […] every semi-urban section about Chicago.”¹⁵ The City Club scheme was not a revolutionary departure from suburban conditions. It sought to manage growth by reforming existing variegations.

A different problem presents itself in the third part, where Levine treats a quartet of large-scale, late-career projects. Provocatively titled, “New Visions for the City Center: Urbanism under the Hegemony of the Automobile,” this concluding section shows Wright to be deeply concerned with resolving programmatic and infrastructural exigencies precipitated by rapid suburbanization and widespread automobilization. Instead of the caustic anti-urbanist Wright is normally portrayed to be, Levine places Wright fairly convincingly at the forefront of debates about determining an appropriate morphology for the deindustrializing postwar urban landscape. In doing so, he also crafts, inadvertently, what might best be characterized as an alternate history of urban renewal.

This adventitious alternative urban history is best exemplified by Wright’s Point Park Civic Center for Pittsburgh (1947). An aerial rendering of the project fills the front cover of Levine’s book (the above rendering of the 1913 competition project graces the back cover). The civic center was sited on the blighted, triangular tip of downtown. It would have combined an overwhelming programmatic variety with ninety-two acres of parking into a spiraling megastructure capable of hosting 123,000 people. As Levine notes, the vast interior could have accommodated over one-fifth of the city’s midcentury population, while parking facilities in its helical exoskeleton would have exceeded planners’ recommendations for all of downtown.¹⁶

Wright later designed a scaled-down proposal for the same site, but he never understood the original scheme’s overabundance of program and parking to be at all problematic. In fact, it was precisely calibrated to produce a renewed urban culture by reaching beyond its immediate environs to reintegrate suburbanites and their automobiles with the city. Levine contends, “In embracing the dynamics and diversity of the city and harnessing the automobile to that centralizing end, the earlier and later projects provide a forum for public gathering and communal activity in which the metaphor of the city as stage and the building as theater play a crucial role.”¹⁷ Wright’s architecture would have drawn visitors to its festive environs from across the suburbanizing region, making them into “agents in the construction of the symbolic form signifying the city’s role in the life of the individual and the collectivity.”¹⁸ In Levine’s telling, the sheer quantity and variety of the civic center’s cultural facilities, its amelioration of traffic congestion, and the permanent urban spectacle thereby created would have collectively averted the numerous, incipient upheavals awaiting midcentury American cities. In the imagined, Wrightian late twentieth century, Pittsburgh would have painlessly navigated the effects of white flight by accommodating to an extreme degree the very mode of transportation that enabled it while also accelerating the city’s transition from heavy industry to culture industry.

At a certain level, one can imagine the successes of Wright’s unbuilt urban works. Levine certainly encourages such speculation. The “spectacular and enticing” drive along the Pittsburgh civic center’s “four-and-a-half mile long ‘street in the air,’” he narrates in present tense, “allows people to look across the space and feel a sense of the community they are part of at the same time as it affords panoramic views of the city and surrounding landscape.”¹⁹ Similar scenes accompany other projects, producing a composite image across the book’s chapters in which Wright’s skillful hand would undoubtedly have solved the twentieth-century American city’s most pressing architectural and infrastructural problems (if only fickle clients and meddling bureaucrats had not denied him the opportunity).

Yet the same composite image merely dissembles other, more nebulous issues. Readers are encouraged to imagine the joys of driving through Wright’s overwrought Pittsburgh project. They are not asked to consider its viability in terms of urban renewal’s actual record. No mention is made of the fitful success of actually built projects that, to borrow David Harvey’s words, similarly used an “architecture of spectacle, with its sense of surface glitter and transitory participatory pleasure, of display and ephemerality, of jouissance,” as “a means to attract capital and people (of the right sort)” back to American downtowns after the race riots, anti-war demonstrations, and countercultural events of the late-1960s.²⁰ In Levine’s narration of Wright’s alternative twentieth century, the reintegration of people and cars with the city produced only cultural cohesion, social stability, and economic equilibrium.

Here is where the question concerning Usonia resurfaces. If Usonia embodied Wright’s effort to extrapolate an ideal American future from the fraught conditions of his present, Levine’s history attempts the same operation in reverse, overlaying a sense of Wrightian resolution onto the complex realities of twentieth-century urban history. The historiographic dilemma of this result is clearest if one acknowledges an unavoidable specter haunting that history, namely, race.

Wright rarely addressed the question of race head-on, and Levine makes no mention of it. As mentioned above, the architect often euphemistically equated the U.S.’s ethnic diversity with other American architects’ propensity for stylistic eclecticism before proffering his own “organic” architecture as a tool for cultural assimilation. He did design two, little-known projects exclusively for African Americans, the Rosenwald School in Virginia (1928) and the Jesse C. Fisher Houses in North Carolina (1957).²¹ Documentation and correspondence related to the Fisher Houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives reveal little of Wright’s attitudes toward race. In a 1929 letter to Lewis Mumford, however, Wright explained that designing the Rosenwald School was like “another modest excursion into the nature and feeling of an alien race such as was the Tokio [sic] hotel on a grand scale.”²² The utter foreignness of black Americans to Wright’s experience of American society raises the question of what place, if any, they would have had in a project like the Pittsburgh Civic Center and, more broadly, in Usonia.

Would Wright have counted the residents of Pittsburgh’s Hill District, a historically black neighborhood just east of downtown, among the “urban multitudes” for whom he designed?²³ His drawings and descriptions of the project show an unwavering focus on the creation of cultural and transportation infrastructures to draw, in Levine’s words, “the ever-expanding masses of suburbanites […] back to the city and to reidentifying with it.”²⁴ No attention was given to facilitating movement across downtown. This may have been because in 1943, three years before Wright designed the civic center, a city councilman advocated the wholesale demolition of the Hill District on the grounds that “there would be no social loss if [the area’s buildings] were all destroyed.”²⁵ Wright’s project was abandoned in 1948. Five years later, in 1953, Edgar Kaufmann (the architect’s sometime patron and prime mover of the original civic center project) successfully lobbied for the opera and sports arena that was to have been included in Wright’s design to be sited in the Hill District, permanently displacing eight thousand residents.²⁶ The stated ambitions of Wright’s project were thus partially and belatedly realized: suburbanites and their automobiles were reconciled with the city. It happened to come at the expense of black Pittsburghers. While Wright’s scheme would not have required such staggering displacement, neither he nor his municipal clients made any overtures to the city’s minority population.

This should be read as neither a facile accusation of racism on Wright’s part nor a suggestion that Usonia was, in the end, a segregated dystopia. It is instead an argument to more fully recognize Wright’s entanglement with complex realities. His work and thought have too often been considered apart from the social and material conditions in which they were produced. Levine makes a strong case for the architect’s active participation in modern urbanism’s evolving discursive landscape. But Wright is also implicated in the multifarious forms of discrimination that underpinned that discourse. The challenge facing historians, critics, and admirers of Wright’s work can therefore best be rendered in the form of a question that layers race onto Wright’s gendered Usonian ideal: Would black residents of the “modern Usonian city” have enjoyed the same “manlike freedom” as their white compatriots?