Arcosanti, situated in the Arizona high desert. Photo: Flickr/andrew c mace
The domes and amphitheaters of Arcosanti are used for various purposes, from displaying pottery to housing concerts. Photo: flickr/Al_HikesAZ
Large archways highlight Soleri's architectural style. Photo: flickr/Jamiriquai
Volunteers cast metal bells to sell to tourists in Arcosanti's foundry, a primary source of revenue for the project. Photo: flickr/heathervescent
Arcosanti's primary residence. Photo: flickr/Xavier de Jauréguiberry
Arcosanti courtyard. Photo: flickr/Jamiriquai
Peering out over Arizona's central desert. Photo: flickr/sbisson
Interior of Arcosanti's main building. Photo: flickr/mandymooo
Soleri designed Arcosanti with a grand, massive vision. This model shows the existing buildings in grey with Soleri's proposed expansion towering overhead. Photo: flickr/Jamiriquai
In 1998, James McGirk spent five weeks living and working in Arcosanti, a desert community built in the 1970s that attempts to use ornate architectural planning to help create a harmonious society. Its designer, Frank Lloyd Wright disciple Paolo Soleri, passed away this week at age 93. McGirk remembers his experiences at the location and his interactions with Soleri.
Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti was as utopian a project as anything built in the 1960s and 70s, a grandiose, ornate secluded Arizona desert community designed with the belief that by cramming tens of thousands of people together, they would “evolve” and crime would disappear. I arrived at Arcosanti after my freshman year of college, in search of the perfect world it promised. What I found, however, wasn’t exactly that.
Architecture and urban planning were once far more megalomaniacal disciplines than they are today. Cities bulldozed historic areas seemingly at the whim of great names like Frederick Law Olmstead, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, leaving superhighways, skyscrapers, and sometimes even entire cities of glass and concrete sprouting in their wake.
At the very peak of this madness, 1970, an incredible exhibit of conceptual plans was unveiled at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Paolo Soleri, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s disciples, suggested you could stuff an entire city into a single structure, what he called an arcology — a mash-up of the words architecture and ecology. The result, he felt, would be a self-sustaining, self-contained hyper-efficient answer to all of mankind’s problems. What’s more, Soleri was no mere dreamer; he was really doing it, building a city for 5,000 souls in the high desert between Sedona and Scottsdale.
I came across Soleri’s drawings as a teenager, in my parents’ bound copy of The Last Whole Earth Catalog (which featured, among other things, excerpts from books that told you how to form a rock band, grow pot, shoplift, or brew methamphetamine in barrels). At the time, I was living in New Delhi, a city that seemed broken: nearly 20 million people, a mad, amoeba-like mob wedged between a few concentric freeways and sustained by a sluggish river and an Edwardian infrastructure.
The Last Whole Earth Catalog featured an overview of Soleri and his concept of arcology. Photo: Jan McGirk
In retrospect, my attraction to Soleri’s drawings of crisp, perfect cities now seems obvious. In my smudged excerpt of his work I couldn’t make out his caveat that ”a warning is necessary for the student. The graphics are not to be taken literally. The symbolism is evident and… the complexity of the system would in any case preclude the possibility of well-thought-out detail in the general context in which this book should remain.” I was intent to become part of it.
By the time I arrived in 1998, however, Arcosanti had changed. The enthusiasm that built most of the project in the 1970s and early 1980s had gone. What was left had curdled into the sluggish but pleasant pace of a non-profit foundation (which, to be fair, it was). In drawings, Soleri’s work is intricately detailed but organic. Tall towers adorned with arches and flowing buttresses that swooped and wobbled for miles and miles. From a distance Arcosanti looked like that too. But up close you could see the grain of it. The granules of stone embedded in the slightly crumbling concrete. It looked primitive and ancient. I had imagined something like Syd Mead’s soaring cities; instead this was like a crumbling Roman ruin.
The organizers for our program installed us in the only buildings on the property that hadn’t been designed by Soleri — a cluster of concrete cubes at the bottom of a hill, beneath the rest of the community. I remember the horrid little boxes being infested with black widow spiders. If you were lucky, you were placed in a yurt. Jimson weed grew everywhere.
For five weeks my eclectic workshop mates and I were part of the Arcosanti community, expected to work in exchange for squibs of knowledge. The city, designed to house thousands of residents, felt enormous with just 50-odd people living and working there at the time. There was a foundry where we melted bronze in crucibles and poured it into sand casts to make wind chimes (selling the bells was how the foundation survived), a garden, a ceramics works, a drafting studio, a woodshop, and a construction yard where my job was spraying concrete with a hose to keep it wet. They took us on field trips to Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s desert project, where the well-groomed architecture fellows sneered at our dust-coated hair and loutish behavior, and to a cultural center Soleri had designed in Scottsdale that is now apparently slated for demolition to make room for a concrete factory.
Soleri arrived towards the end of the program for a visit that lasted just a few hours. He was spry and leathery, and against the sun-baked concrete swoops and apses and arches and circular doors, he looked like a character from a J.G. Ballard short story, the caretaker of a long-dead monument. He had us all squat with him on a mat in the planning room. We could ask him questions. Unlike his bold-named predecessors he was gracious and self-effacing. I managed to embarrass him. I asked earnestly about an obscure article where he’d suggested humans might evolve into cubes after centuries of arcology life, and he put his hand over his face and groaned and said that some things can’t be unwritten.
In a similar sense, Arcosanti felt like an anachronism, a permanent representation of a different time and a different ideology. Walking through the domes felt like walking through ruins, rather than the white-hot center of architectural thought it ought to have been, and to many, always seemed so close to becoming. (The idea of arcology has always been touted as of crucial importance — just not yet.) Unlike New Delhi, which has blossomed since I lived there, Arcosanti was too rigid of a structure — literally, its physical plant couldn’t adapt, and figuratively, its social structure was too fixed — to contain the full spectrum of people a city needs to survive; not just high priests and acolytes, but entrepreneurs and rogues too.
From my perspective as an eighteen-year-old architecture student who, at the time, shared (or thought he shared) Soleri’s vision, Arcosanti was undone by the same thing that killed off so many other projects: the people living in it. Not so much because they didn’t believe what Soleri believed, but because the original people working there either got frustrated and left, or stayed there and got older and settled into their cozy, Soleri-designed apartments to live a pleasant, hippy-dream life, sustained by the acolytes, the eager arcology champions like myself, who paid a couple hundred dollars to come out to the Arizona desert and learn from the master.
(A lack of funding and construction equipment was also to blame.)
On one of my last days there, there was an outdoor concert in the gigantic amphitheater. Guests came pouring in, seemingly from out of nowhere, and filled the place (we were deputized to serve them food, but joined afterwards). As the sun went down, the residents set up speakers and blasted classical music out over the desert, and then suddenly a massive storm came rushing up, bolts of lightning crackled over the horizon. It was just dark enough that, for a moment, you could forget all the spiders and grime and lose yourself in the collective awe of the crowd. At that moment, if you let your eyes glaze over just a bit, you could imagine yourself in a toga, a thousand years in the future, when Arcosanti was just a tiny outpost, and the entire world was tucked into an arcology.
Looking back, I sometimes still suspect that Soleri’s time will come.
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