In the 1970s, visionary architect Paolo Soleri built an extraordinary eco-city in the Arizona desert. Did it work? Steve Rose tracks down a guru who now finds himself back in demand

Wind-bells tinkle and cypresses sway in the breeze. The sun casts sharp shadows across an undulating landscape. There are strange concrete forms everywhere: giant open vaults, painted half-domes with strange crests, an amphitheatre ringed by buildings with giant circular openings, little houses sunk into the hillside. Healthy-looking, vaguely hippy-ish people, young and old, stride about in dusty jeans and T-shirts. Beyond are the scrub-covered hills of the Sonoran desert. This not your typical American settlement. In fact, it’s not your typical Earth settlement. For one thing, there are no cars or roads. Everything is connected by winding footpaths. Nor are there shops, billboards, or any other garish commercial intrusion. It looks like the set of a sci-fi movie designed by Le Corbusier. Round the next corner, you might expect to bump into Luke Skywalker, or Socrates, or a troupe of dancers doing Aquarius.

This is Arcosanti, 70 miles from Phoenix, Arizona. It’s a curious taste of what an environmentally friendly US town could look like, but probably never will. It was designed by Paolo Soleri, an Italian-born architect, who originally came to Arizona to work for Frank Lloyd Wright, but soon set off on his own idiosyncratic path. Soleri is a genuine visionary architect. In the early 1970s, his designs and fantastical writings made him a big-hitter in architectural circles, up there with other postwar sci-fi modernists such as Buckminster Fuller. Then he all but disappeared, becoming, for the past 30 years, little more than an obscure curiosity. Yet today, as the world wakes up to the grim realities of climate change, peak oil and sustainability, Soleri’s path looks less idiosyncratic. In fact, he’s now something of a guru: in demand on the lecture circuit and, recently, offering sage advice in Leonardo DiCaprio’s “how can we save the world?” documentary The 11th Hour. Soleri invented “ecotecture” before the word even existed. In the 1960s, he derived a similar term, “arcology”, to describe low-impact, environmentally oriented design. But Soleri’s arcology went beyond mere architecture. He developed an entire philosophy of civilisation, laid out in his 1969 book, The City in the Image of Man. It is a wondrous tome, full of lucid rhetoric, almost impenetrable diagrams and spectacular drawings of “arcologies”: fantasy cities of the future intricately rendered. Rather than inefficient, land-hungry, low-rise, car-dependent cities (like nearby Phoenix), Soleri’s arcologies are dense, compact, car-free, and low-energy. Their gigantic structures leave nature unspoilt and readily accessible. Some are hundreds of metres high, designed to accommodate six million people; others are built on top of dams, or form artificial canyons, or float in the open sea.

Four decades on, Soleri is still happy to expound on the state and the fate of the city. He welcomes me to Arcosanti, then gets straight down to business, explaining what he tried to set up here by first rounding on his old mentor Frank Lloyd Wright for glamorising suburbia. This, says Soleri, actually leads to the breakdown of the city, as what he calls “the hermitage” begins: “Instead of people gathering to develop a culture, they want to escape from other people. Individuals believe they can reach a level of self-sufficiency that can isolate them – or their family – in an ideal place. Then they somehow expect the civilisation that has made them to serve them. It’s a parasitic kind of life.”

in the 1970s, Soleri’s vision of an alternative drew hundreds of student volunteers from all over the world to build Arcosanti, a prototype arcology with a projected population of 5,000. They worked for free in the sweltering heat, sleeping outside and learning from the master – who, judging by the photos, was usually to be found in swimming trunks and a short-sleeved shirt, digging alongside them. “It was not a community for community’s sake, eating tofu and giving each other back rubs,” says Roger Tolman, who oversaw construction. “It was the opposite of the hippy scene: a community of construction workers. If you were going to be here, you were going to work – harder than you’d ever worked in your life.”

Full Story: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/aug/25/
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