My name is Juliet Kinchin, and I'm curator of modern design in the Department of Architecture
and Design in the Museum of Modern Art.
And the key object in the section I'm curating is a model of a prefabricated Little Farms
Unit from 1932.
What we're looking at is a design for a composite prefabricated farm unit which brought together
five elements; animal pens, greenhouses, a packing area and silo and living quarters
for the--for the farmer.
We’re at the height of the Great Depression.
And people are talking in many different contexts about the farm, both as the root of complex
problems and urbanization and agricultural slump.
But also as possibly the way forward out of this really dire moment in the American economy.
The initial project was defined by Walter Davidson in great detail in a letter to Frank
Lloyd Wright, with which he sent a couple of drawings, very detailed plans, both for
a Little Farms Unit and a related market system.
And we can see these drawings, which I think are possibly Davidson's.
He was one of a whole generations of specialists called efficiency experts and packaging engineers.
He really understood how to shift large quantities of produce.
This project is about bringing the farm into the modern, the modern day, combining modern
technology, modern ways of building through pre fabricating and cheap steel, and introducing
these new transformative clean forms of energy like electricity rather than polluting chemicals.
But it was also about planning the farm in this compact, small-scale way.
So rather than having these functions dispersed in separate buildings, you have one composite
unit, which Wright envisioned as being slightly reconfigured with these geometric elements
to suit changes in the local terrain.
You can see the elements of the Little Farm's vision and the Wayside Market's vision are
completely subsumed into Frank Lloyd Wright's descriptions and vision of Broadacre City.
The key to this whole idea was the idea that this network, this tract of about 200 farms,
ranging between three to five acres, would have daily truckloads taking the fresh produce
straight to one of these wayside markets.
But this wasn't just a pit stop for a few vegetables for motorists.
Davidson wanted something altogether more substantial, which would form a destination.
You know there was a crèche and a beauty parlor.
There were three different types of eateries, as well as the delicatessen, the popcorn and
peanut butter units, and masses of fresh flowers and produce, which from the outside made this
ziggurat form like a temple of fresh produce.
So really making it a community center in
this idea of a kind of dispersed way of inhabiting the rural landscape.
The farm was central to Frank Lloyd Wright's broad-ranging vision for the new ecological
and urban landscape.