CFP-2024 Save Wright Annual Conference: Frank Lloyd Wright & the American City Today
Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture asks us to live in an ever-emerging America and to consider our relationships with each other in terms of the natural and cultural landscapes in enriching ways. As his conceptions of “The Living City” developed across the decades, he came to see the automobile and modern means of communication as tools to rethink the historical tension between the city and the suburbs in American life.
Wright, and many others in his milieu, were vitally interested in settlement patterns, natural and productive landscapes, as well as various approaches to affordable housing in the context of the push-pull of cities and their hinterlands. By the 1930s, his Broadacre City vision built upon earlier civic explorations extending the notion of the city block, as he adapted his ideas to a series of landscapes, scales and social contexts. The relationships with the American landscape explored by the small-scale farming, networked communities and great cultural centers of Broadacre City are examples of a wide range of American urban planning approaches in the twentieth century worthy of comparison.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy invites paper proposals for its annual conference. This year’s conference addresses the relationships of Wright’s work and legacy to historical and contemporary issues of American landscapes, cities and suburbs through a critical lens. We especially invite submissions from individual or collective experience about living through historic cultural shifts or currently working to advance new paradigms of living and working in contemporary cities. Submit proposals by March 18, 2024, at savewright.org/proposals.
