Page 16 - C.A.L.L. #43 - Winter 2017

the middle of Usonia is a winding section of chain-link fence. Modern suburban life has, in the decades
since the community was built, crept increasingly close.

And Usonia has changed. Children of the original members still live in the community, but now they
share it with newer families, some of whom have less interest in the ideals that shaped it. Some don’t live
in Usonia full-time, but come up only on weekends. “When I was growing up, this was a community
where doors were open,” says Josh Podell, who has lived in Usonia for much of his life. “Every adult was
almost like your secondary parent. All of those things have changed. There isn’t as much community
spirit.”

Whether that shift was inevitable, and whether it matters, is the subject of a lot of debate in Usonia. Are
all experiments in cooperative living necessarily short-lived, made for and defined by the particular
moment in which they took shape? Or has Usonia become some looser version of itself for another
reason, perhaps generational or cultural? Frank Lloyd Wright regularly made lofty, outsize claims about
the power of his architecture: it could shape experience, he argued, could lead to freer, more
democratic lives. Was there ever any way for his houses to deliver on those promises?

Before it was a place on the map of upstate New York, Usonia was an idea that David and Priscilla
Henken had for a cooperative inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s philosophies of the ideal American
community. Wright wanted to dismantle American cities and replace them with a vast network of small
communities modeled after Broadacre City, his utopia. He believed, he wrote in 1932, that every family
should have an acre of land and a beautiful home. (“No distinction exists between much and little, more
and less. Quality is in all, for all, alike.”) He went on to write that “each citizen of the future will have all
forms of production, distribution, self improvement, enjoyment, within a radius of a hundred and fifty
miles of his home now easily and speedily available by means of his car or plane.”

The building block of Wright’s vision was the Usonian home, an affordable house for the masses. (Wright
advocated replacing the word American with Usonian, to indicate the country’s unique architectural
vernacular.) The standard
Usonian home would be a
single story, oriented away
from the street and toward
nature. Large windows
were meant to bring the
outdoors in, but overhangs
helped people feel
protected from the outside
world as well. Wright
wanted to encourage
families to spend most of
their time together, so he
made open-plan living and
work spaces, centered
around a hearth that would
draw people together.
Bedrooms were kept very Photo: Ashley Gates
small to discourage
inhabitants from spending
too much time away from the communal space.

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