Arcosanti, 70 miles from Phoenix, Arizona is 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 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.
In the 1950s, Soleri built a base in Scottsdale, a desert town that has since been engulfed by Phoenix. He still lives there now. Named Cosanti, it was the prototype for Arcosanti: a complex of experimental, sculptural buildings born of low-energy construction methods such as “earthcasting”: build a mound of earth, pour a layer of concrete over it, take away the earth and, hey presto, you’ve got a dome. Curiously, Soleri’s main source of income was not architecture but windbells. Soleri wind-bells, cast from ceramic and bronze, still sell well. The windbell money, combined with lecture circuit cash, meant Soleri could buy the land for Arcosanti outright.
Unfortunately, Arcosanti doesn’t seem to have got much further since. Only 3% of the original design has been built; the rest doesn’t look likely to spring out of the desert any time soon. Arcosanti never quite achieved the critical mass it needed. Its population reached a peak of about 200 in the mid-1970s, but today is lower than 60. That 1970s idealism gave way to 1980s “me generation” priorities and people moved on to “proper jobs”, Tomalty says. A regular flow of students still passes through, but they treat it more as a five-week work experience than an open-ended lifestyle experiment.
Soleri has slowed as well. Already in his 50s when he started Arcosanti, he is now 89, still fit and articulate, but that once hypnotic voice is now a hushed murmur, barely audible above the desert wind. “The main fault is me,” he says when I ask him why Arcosanti has not been completed. “I don’t have the gift of proselytising. For years and years, they responded to me like, ‘That crazy guy, what is he doing out there?'”
Inevitably, the real reason for Arcosanti’s incomplete state is money. Visionary he might be, but Soleri never seems too bothered with finance. Did he really expect to be able to build a city by selling wind-bells? Soleri laughs. “I was driven by emotions. I never sat down and said, ‘What am I going to do now?’ I was too busy.” But, I ask, is it possible to build a utopia without money?
The tragedy is that, judging by the buildings completed at Arcosanti, Soleri was a terrific architect. These are mostly bare-faced concrete, but they incorporate wood, murals, tiles and intricate details that lend them a homely, handbuilt quality, like the best of Le Corbusier’s later work. They might have taken a long time to build, but they possess a spatial richness and geometric coherence that most modern boxes lack, both inside and out. And they are exemplary in their incorporation of simple, low-tech environmental principles.
Concrete apses are oriented to capture the heat and light of the low winter sun, yet also provide shade when it is at its highest in summer. And the roads, of course, are relegated to the perimeter. Later phases in Arcosanti’s design would have called for 25-storey towers, transforming the village-like settlement into a dense city. They wouldn’t be difficult to construct. If this was China, you could probably complete Arcosanti in about a year. But what exists there already is rather compelling – a persuasive alternative to current urbanism. In fact, it could represent the kind of sustainable, low-energy lives we are belatedly coming to realise we should have been living all along.
Rather than a “crazy guy” ranting in the wilderness, Soleri has proved to be a voice of reason. Nobody wanted to hear his diagnosis of the ills of US society, but it has been proved right – the car-centric, inefficient, horizontal suburban model has left us in poor shape to cope with climate-change problems. Yet Soleri is sceptical of new-found admirers of his philosophy. “They take a very shallow understanding of it,” he says. In Soleri’s view, we need to reformulate, rather than simply reform, our strategy for civilisation. His outlook is not hopeful. “Materialism is, by definition, the antithesis of green,” he says. “We have this unstoppable, energetic, self-righteous drive that’s innate in us, but which has been reoriented by limitless consumption. Per se, it doesn’t have anything evil about it. It’s a hindrance. But multiply that hindrance by billions, and you’ve got catastrophe.”
Soleri long ago came to terms with the fact that Arcosanti will not be completed in his lifetime. What will happen after his death is up for debate. Some trustees of the Arcosanti Foundation want to see it completed to his original vision; others think it should be opened up to other architects, or even turned into a health spa to generate revenue. Soleri suggests it could be sold to a university or architectural research organisation. Whatever happens, Soleri’s ideas could well be of benefit to future architects, if not as a wholesale solution, then at least as a source of inspiration.
Perhaps Soleri was simply too far ahead of his time. “I’ve put quite a lot of work into this,” he says, looking out over his domain. “But there’s no point in sitting and moaning”.
– from guardian
In India there similar kind of experiment is going on named “Auroville”. Township founded in 1968 Viluppuram district in the state of Tamil Nadu, India. Auroville was founded in 1968 by Mirra Alfassa, also known as The Mother. She was a collaborator of Sri Aurobindo, who believed that “man is a transitional being”. Alfassa expected that this experimental “universal township” would contribute significantly in the “progress of humanity towards its splendid future by bringing together people of goodwill and aspiration for a better world.”