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Paolo Soleri (1919-2013) was a visionary architect.
A thinker and philosopher.
Long before I ever heard the word “ecology,” I was fascinated by his original experimental buildings at Cosanti, which was just outside of Scottsdale in Paradise Valley. Architecture students from across the globe would spend summers as volunteer interns making his vision into reality, while learning his creative building techniques.
There was a gallery at Cosanti which displayed his drawings of a city for the future which he called Arcosanti. That future city is now coming to life, a project under construction in the high desert of Northern Arizona.
Much of his work was funded by sales of Soleri’s beautiful bronze bells, bell-windchimes, and sculptures.
The word “Cosanti” comes from two Italian terms: “Cosa” and “Anti,” which together mean, literally, “Before (or Against) Things.” Here at the residence and sculpture studios of Paolo Soleri and his staff, architecture has come before everything else, and indeed, it is the architecture of this place that makes things possible here. Choosing the idea that Cosanti means “Against Things” leads to an understanding of Soleri’s anti-materialist stance: the ideas generated here have helped to develop a lean and frugal methodology for approaching life on earth and the designs of cities that would support that attitude and that life.
Soleri, (later joined by his students) began work on Cosanti’s experimental buildings in the 1950s. Now designated as an Arizona Historic Site, Cosanti presents a unique bio-climatic architectural environment. Its structures feature many imaginative design elements, reflecting Soleri’s innovative construction techniques.
Arcology is Paolo Soleri's concept of cities which embody the fusion of architecture with ecology. The arcology concept proposes a highly integrated and compact three-dimensional urban form that is the opposite of urban sprawl with its inherently wasteful consumption of land, energy resources and time, and tendency to isolate people from each other and the community. Miniaturization creates the Urban Effect, the complex interaction between diverse entities and individuals, which mark healthy systems both in the natural world and in every successful and culturally significant city in history.
Arcology reduces city's dependence on the automobile. Today’s typical city devotes more than sixty percent of its land to roads and automobile services. The multi-use nature of arcology design would put living, working, and public spaces within easy reach of each other and walking would be the main form of transportation within the city.
Pollution is a direct function of wastefulness, not efficiency. In a three dimensional city, energy and resources are used more efficiently than in a conventional modern city. Suburban sprawl mandates a hyper-production-consumption cycle and creates mountains of waste and pollutants.
An arcology’s direct proximity to uninhabited wilderness would provide the city dweller with constant immediate and low-impact access to rural space as well as allowing agriculture to be situated near the city, maximizing the efficiency of a local food distribution system. Arcology would use passive solar architectural techniques such as the apse effect, greenhouse architecture and garment architecture to reduce the energy usage of the city, especially in terms of heating, lighting and cooling.
In nature, as an organism evolves it increases in complexity and it also becomes a more compact or miniaturized system. Similarly a city should function as a living system. Arcology, architecture and ecology as one integral process, is capable of demonstrating positive response to the many problems of urban civilization, population, pollution, energy and natural resource depletion, food scarcity and quality of life. Arcology recognizes the necessity of the radical reorganization of the sprawling urban landscape into dense, integrated, three-dimensional cities in order to support the complex activities that sustain human culture. The city is the necessary instrument for the evolution of humankind."
— Paolo Soleri
While I really admire the concepts behind Arcosanti, I’m afraid I would wind up being like the protagonist in John Hersey’s futuristic novel about a world so overpopulated that people never have a single private moment, and all the “action” takes place standing in an endless line waiting to hand in My Petition for More Space.
In a 1986 interview with The Paris Review, Hersey recounted how he'd been introduced to the idea of a word processor at the design department of the Yale School of Art in 1972. Here’s his recollection of the first time he used the machine:
“I had just finished the longhand draft of a novel that was eventually called My Petition for More Space, so I thought, well, I'll try the revision on this machine. And I found it just wonderfully convenient … It was simply a time-saver. It took about a month to get used to looking at words on a screen, almost as if in a new language; but once that was past, it seemed just like using a typewriter. So when these badly-named machines -- processor! God! -- came on the market some years later, I was really eager to find one.…”
To borrow writer Matthew Kirschenbaum's words, John Hersey may have been "the first to commit acts of literature on any kind of computer."
And that began a whole other evolution of humankind.
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