Search for a Lean Alternative - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 525

FIGURE 30.5
Crafts III building contains visitor's center, gallery, bakery, café, and residences.
the highest point in the complex and is available for overnight guests. Most of the build-
ings have accessible roofs.
As an urban laboratory, Arcosanti has sought to incorporate the practice of cooperation
and cooperative use rather than ownership, longevity rather than obsolescence, contain-
ment rather than diaspora, integration, self-responsibility, spirituality and transcendence
against materialism, faith in sensible technology, the struggle against homogenization,
authority rather than power, and universalism rather than nationalism. Following are
some concrete examples:
• Self-containment of the habitat and adherence to the paradigm of complexity-min-
iaturization duration
• Eficient use of resources (not self-suficiency, but self-reliance)
• Reciprocal synergy between the urban and the rural
• Integration of dwelling, learning, working in a structure designed with walkable
distances
• Preservation of the emotional, sensorial, and environmental sensibility
• Rejection of prepackaged information
The necessary frugality of the project makes residents aware of the site's limited resources.
Prime among them is the value of water and the care required to limit its use. Arcosanti's
response to this issue has centered on the concept of the public garden oasis as part of a
miniaturized, collective urban habitat. The water saving is enormous when we compare
it to the water used by single homes. The use of greenhouse culture is also a strategy
for saving water at Arcosanti. Sitting as it does on marginal land, we have excluded any
construction on the acreage of farmland below the habitat. But the main saving is defined
by the habitat's structure: There are no single homes with their attendant waste of water
in gardens, lawns, swimming pools, car washes, and so on. The immediate proximity of
wilderness, ravine, canyon, mesas, and cultivatable land is a powerful reminder of the
richness of the natural landscape, engendering intrinsic respect and care. Dusk and dawn
are particularly beautiful, reinforcing this immediacy of response.
Since Arcosanti is the place for the alternative, the marketplace must adapt to it and not
vice versa. The lean alternative is a challenge to the marketplace. Given the relative size
and power of Arcosanti, the challenge is minuscule, ephemeral. That is one reason why