In April 1935, Rockefeller Center hosted an exhibition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City. At face value, the show’s content and venue could not be more dissonant. Begun in 1929, Rockefeller Center is an unequivocal statement on urban concentration, conceived as a marriage of cultural and commercial interests capable of accommodating Manhattan’s hyper-concentration of people and capital; first envisioned in 1930, Broadacre City abandons the existing American metropolis in favor of radical decentralization, embodying its architect’s rural, agrarian, democratic ideals. This dissertation looks beyond these apparent incongruities and treats these projects as opposing poles of the same endeavor: to gain control materially and conceptually over the early twentieth century’s urban, regional, even national territories. By juxtaposing these two projects and contextualizing them within changing relationships among the city, suburbs, and surrounding region, this study explores the limits of architects’ ability to exercise influence over expanded physical and ideological terrain.
Rather than focus on the singular creative activities of the individuals involved, this study will detail the projects’ emergence from a shared set of historical conditions. Rockefeller Center and Broadacre City occupy pivotal positions within contemporary attempts by architects, designers, planners, and critics to organize the built environment around a rapidly expanding industrial economy, new modes of transportation, innovations in communications technology, and attendant social transformations. The relationship between the two projects can best be clarified through the concept of territory, understood here as a historically situated relationship between a specific place and the economic, social, geographical, legal, political, technical, and discursive practices that govern it. My argument is that each project deploys architecture—which must be understood here to include not only formal and spatial qualities but also organizational, technological, infrastructural, and environmental concerns—as a primary means through which to order the urban, regional, even national territory.
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