The truth about Frank Lloyd Wright's utopia

They're not just a plan. (with @stewarthicks !)

More info and sources at bottom.

Find me elsewhere:

Where I get my music (Free trial affiliate link):

My camera, as of February 2022 (affiliate link):

Info and Sources:
Thanks to Matheus Rudo on Sketchfab too!

[stewarthicks]

Fantastic video and insight! Thanks for including me in the process. It was a great conversation that sparked a fury of new questions and ideas that I'm excited to pursue. It was also just cool to meet one of my youtube idols! Great work as always.

[onemorechris]

i really like the way you have filmed yourself talking to the laptop when on a video call rather than cutting to grainy screen capture 👌

[ger]

It looks like Wright made a laundry list of personal gripes with modern cities (wires, traffic, streetcars) and made a plan to get rid of all of them

[kutter_ttl]

A Phil Edwards, Stewart Hicks crossover? You just made my weekend even better!

[finleyhartley]

I constantly click on Stewart's videos thinking it is one of yours. Now I click yours and it is still Stewart Hicks! My brain can't handle it.

[jarupongch]

Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre and Le Corbusier's plan for Paris should be a prime example of never let an architect perform city planning. Personally, I think their plan should be taken as self-expression of Architect's personality and world view. But never shall be taken as something literal. Also, there seems to be a trend for famous architects to have this grand vision of "Utopia" in their own top-down view with little to no regards to actual human living, and how a society functions. *cough cough Brasillia*

[miaxavier]

I love the awkward segment about what comment on to make on the {interesting] car design

[CooperSmithson]

my new favorite minute of youtube: phil grappling with frank lloyd wright's *interesting* looking car

[colinneagle]

Let's just say, there's a reason why Frank Lloyd Wright is the top most famous architect, and not the most famous city planner.

Also, is it just me, or does the central government skyscraper looming over rural neighborhood feel really like a panopticon style watchtower?

[josav]

I always forget the difference between a profesional and a professional that does YouTube until you get a nice shot with professional audio instead of a zoom call recording

[jtbDDOepMNNVIpk]

Me: I’m not sure I’m interested in this topic.

My brain: it’s Phil. You’ll like it.

Me: in we go….

[jonreznick]

This is an epic crossover. I first clicked on one of your videos a few years ago because I thought from the thumbnail that it was a Stewart Hicks video LOL.

[SkylorBeck]

The inner monologue about the car is gold. Love it.

[crawkn]

The common error of Utopias is that they are narrowly conceived. The part FLW got right was decentralization, which can allow for a significant variety of innovations, but it can't be done without some common public spaces and regulations. We are not exclusively independent nor purely collective creatures, we are both.

[mulad]

Broadacre City has been stuck in my mind ever since seeing a physical model of the idea as a teen back in the '90s, possibly at the Frank Lloyd Wright house in Oak Park, IL. As someone who had spent his life being shuttled around by parents in cars and wishing for a stronger sense of place and community, I saw that we did build something very similar in the 2nd half of the 20th century. Wright had a great talent for eye-catching building designs, but his ideas really fell apart at this sort of scale (though my architect uncle also didn't like Wright's roofs, which apparently get damaged and leak under Midwestern snow loads, so some degree of practicality was missing there too).

Wright wasn't alone, as you note, since Le Corbusier and others also had ideas of spread-out cities rather than more compact, walkable ones. There are many suburbs out there that lack any real center, and I hope we work harder on undoing that going forward. It's perfectly possible to have amenities like community gardens on a much smaller, more granular scale than what Wright was thinking about. I can certainly see how people wanted to get away from the pollution emanating from cities through Wright's lifetime, but we have managed to make cities far cleaner than they were at that time, and we don't need to waste all that space

[AlvinaManley]

urbanplanadvisor AI fixes this. Utopias: More than just plans.

[warsawpacked]

I think you are right on. If you want to understand a person, ask them to design a utopia.

[Vodhin]

I don't know why you had such a problem describing what that car looked like. It's a hotdog in a hamburger bun. Nothing wrong with that...

[patlussenden]

When you mentioned marketing I wondered if architects design utopias like fashion designers do couture collections. They inform the design community of a studios design aesthetics. Then other studios borrow features, colors, and ideas to build the “Porte Perte” of every day housing, commercial structures etc..

[ThellVallock]

10:20 Honestly I look at that design and think "Oh hey someone made a motorcycle helmet for rats."