Do It Yourself: From Individual Sovereignty to Civic Design

With the Usonian Automatic construction system, Frank Lloyd Wright provided citizens of Usonia—Wright’s preferred term for a culturally advanced North America—with the means of “doing it themselves,” of building their own homes and communities. Though designing ways to provide moderate-cost housing on a large scale had preoccupied Wright for years—and resulted in his invention of numerous construction systems—the Usonian Automatic would be different: almost open source in its sensibility, it was explicitly intended to allow anyone to build their own buildings, of their own earth, on their own ground.