Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
1947 to 1949. Soleri became disillusioned as he discovered, to his dismay,
Wright's suburban predilections for stand-alone houses (or, eventually,
attention-grabbing and self-aggrandizing monuments like the Guggenheim
Museum). Soleri fled back to Italy, but returned in 1955. He settled in
Scottsdale,Arizona, assuming the post of professor of art and architecture at
Arizona State University. While he has built many distinguished buildings,
Soleri is one of the best-known utopian city planners of the twentieth cen-
tury. His reaction to the current urban situation is hostility, or aggravation
with the city, and his solution—the annihilation of the city as we know
it—contends with one of the deepest-seated of cultural inventions. Natu-
rally, resistance to his ideas outstrips his actual proposal, which, if imple-
mented, would only enhance the lives of the vast majority of city dwellers.
Soleri wishes to conserve the city's space rather than allow it to spread
horizontally along the ground. The megastructures he envisions are
designed both to perpetuate the natural surroundings by allowing them to
remain self-sustaining, even under agriculture, or be planted as park-like
recreational gardens, while within his giant buildings support networks
would intensify the humanly social activities of living aesthetically while
fostering creative work. These noble and apparently non-controversial
ideals fly in the face of urban reality as its has developed from its ancient
roots. For a very long time the basic idea of “the city” has appeared less like
an artifact, subject to deliberated adaptation, and more like a value to be
accepted or rejected but not fundamentally discussed. Indeed, any city's
shaping and evolution (with the increasingly rare plastic influence of a
Haussmann upon Paris) has become as estranged from its dwellers as their
control of the other aspects of their lives.Yet this was not always the case,
as the centrality of the urban idea recalls a constructed milieu intended to
rival nature with a sculptural density and an outline against the sky, a hive
of activity that must have been envisioned thousands of years before it was
achieved. It offered hope of control, a technology to alleviate present threats
(beasts of prey and marauders) while enhancing the human social potential
(crafts, commerce, art).The great urban justification, the price of these ben-
efits, may be becoming exorbitant, as Paolo Soleri recognized earlier than
many.
Beginning in 1959 with his designs for Mesa City (a desert city housing
2 million people), Soleri investigated the possibilities, mainly with thought
experiments, of condensing cities spatially—his beloved notion of “minia-
turization.” The resulting integrated, total environments, Soleri dubbed
