Frank Lloyd Wright's Greatest Urban Hits

The 150th anniversary of the birth of Frank Lloyd Wright is complicated for people who love architecture and cities. Wright, who was born June 8, 1867, and died in 1959 at 91, was the greatest architect America has ever produced, the creator of the unforgettable Fallingwater in western Pennsylvania and the nautilus-like Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. But the flip side of Wright’s deep love of the natural world—the inspiration for many of his designs—was a loathing of the urban. “To look at the plan of a great City is to look at something like the cross-section of a fibrous tumor,” he once wrote.

Wright was the opposite of a flâneur—a prophet of urban decentralization who was crazy about cars. (He even coined the term “carport.”) “[G]rid-iron congestion is crucifixion,” he proclaimed in his book The Disappearing City. Wright (in)famously concocted a utopian scheme called Broadacre City, a nation-scaled exurb of large homesteads connected by superhighways.