The new Frank Lloyd Wright show at MoMA is only one small room, but it takes on all the big concerns of urban designers and planners today: How should a city be organized, especially now, when most of the world lives in them? (The balance was just beginning to tip from rural to urban when Wright began as an architect.) And it comes at a perfect time, when New York City, among others, is specifically facing some of the very same questions regarding tall buildings that Wright wrestled with his entire life; just four blocks away, skyscraper residences are being built along Fifty-seventh Street that are stirring up some of the same issues Wright debated.

A more immediate reason for MoMA’s “Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal” is to celebrate the recent joint acquisition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s archive by MoMA and Columbia University’s Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library. It’s a triumph in the obvious sense; Wright remains one of the 20th century’s most influential designers. But it is also a triumph in the smaller ways of archival masterpieces. Stand close to Wright’s memos. Observe the penciled letters, on, for instance, the rectangular page of numbers entitled “Cubic Content,” which describes the (then revolutionary) open space in a planned tower. Savor his uppercase R , the descender headed gracefully off to the right and away, like a ski jump. That’s Wright writing for us, or so it seems.

The show begins where it ends, on tall buildings, starting with a building Wright designed in 1913 as a 24-story headquarters for the San Francisco Call . His seven-foot-tall, eight-foot-wide wooden model of the Call building?the very model that Wright himself brought to the first architectural exhibit at MoMA’s then-new building on West Fifty-third Street?takes the structural breakthroughs of his former employer, Louis Sullivan, and nearly doubles them, stressing what MoMA’s curators refer to as its “verticality.” What is striking about it to the modern viewer, aside from its hyper-European sensibility (you can imagine Wright helping found the Bauhaus) is the large marketplace that takes up the entire ground floor, in contrast to, say, the amount of active open space that would be called for today. But then the early part of his career was all about battling back the developers’ worst impulses, enacting setbacks for tall buildings, fighting what he called “congestion.” In 1926, in response to some of the first zoning ordinances in New York City, he wrote “Skyscraper Regulation”: 24 lane roadways at ground level for cars, pedestrians on elevated walkways, green spaces in the center of blocks (hiding parking garages), and, at the edges, low, flat-roofed buildings, making for aesthetically manageable canyon edges.

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Photo: The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

One of Wright’s last city-centric projects was for William Norman Guthrie, a progressive pastor, whose parish, St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, in the moment before the stock market crash, hoped to build income-producing apartments. The proposed modular tower that grew out of the 1927 project?ingeniously configured as three floors in two?became a defining concept in the remainder of his career. The floors push out to form the one single structural core, which Wright compared to a taproot, like a small tree or carrot. The stock market crashed; the tower was never built. But by this point Wright was proving himself to be Jeffersonian, giving up on the city itself, predicting it’s decline, though often, the curators note, while living in the city and designing there. (He lived at the Plaza while finishing the Guggenheim, for instance.)

“The present city . . . has nothing to give the citizen . . . because centralization [has] no vital forces of regeneration,” Wright wrote. He began to see the car and the telephone as generators of what we would one day refer to as Flat Earthness, of what planners refer to as “horizontality.” He was moving from starchitect (one of the first) to landscape designer or urban planner; in other words, he was urban-designing away from the urban, out in the wide-open space of his Midwest, as seen in the magnificent must-see piece that is at the center?literally?of the exhibit: Broadacre City.

Broadacre City is gorgeous as a thing; a room-size, handmade wooden square, representing four square miles of what Wright referred to as “everywhere or nowhere.” The display panels that originally accompanied it said: “A New Pattern for Living in America.” It was constructed from 1934 to 1935 in Arizona, and then, accompanied by one of Wright’s assistant, it toured the U.S.?Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, and Madison, Wisconsin?and the world. Wright anticipated what would happen next?highway overpasses, for instance?and you can see his taproot structures, versions of the St. Mark’s tower, in a few places in the panorama. The skyscraper worked away from the city, Wright argued. In the city, he said, they were “space-makers for rent,” built high merely for financial gain, which “exaggerated superconcentration.” But outside the city, he saw the skyscraper as something like a beacon.

In fact, in Broadacre City, skyscrapers served the greater community. They were primarily intended to house civic institutions, and design-wise, Wright believed they prevented the cluttering of, say, numerous courts and municipal offices throughout the civic landscape. In that cleared-away space, instead, is small manufacturing; it’s craft Brooklyn writ large. (I couldn’t spot it in the model, but I can recall seeing elsewhere Wright’s model for a gas station, the second floor being a public meeting space.) The airspace in Broadacre accommodates the small private aircraft we would all likely own in his future. The homes described as “luxurious” are big, though not in comparison to some of the things that we see in Beverly Hills today. The homes described as “little” feel majestic, each with an acre of (free) land meant for farming. Then there is a building described thusly: “Small School for Small Children.” Urban planners now tend to think of congestion as a productive thing, to be managed for gain; we live in the city for the coincidences and the power of connections; and for that reason, you wish you could walk him through Greenwich Village in the 1960s with Jane Jacobs. In the ’70s, of course, most of the U.S. had turned its back on cities and was off creating suburbs, ending up in a sprawl Wright would likely have detested. Broadacre City, to its great credit, seeks to give what’s small a chance.

The show ends with his 1956 proposal for a mile-high building, intended to house 100,000 Illinois employees, freeing up the space around it for vast greenness. It is beautiful, as well as a little terrifying. One comes away from the show seeing Wright as too much of an artist to sell a model city. It’s just too clean. As a visionary, on the other hand, his ideas are still in high gear. Not too long ago, I visited the only Frank Lloyd Wright skyscraper ever to have been built, the Price Tower, in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. On top of the nineteen-story tower?another version of his St. Mark’s plan?the restaurant gives you a wide-open feeling. When you look out into the vast bowl-like valley, into hundreds of square miles of Oklahoma and Kansas, you feel like a visionary yourself, or at least in the thrall of Frank Lloyd Wright’s panoramic view.

“Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal” opened this week and is on view through June 1, 2014 at MoMA .