Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
“arcology,” a term he invented by joining
arc
hitecture and ec
ology.
The term
refers to Soleri's utopian blend of light industry supporting a complex that
would include schools, parks and greenhouses—all within constructions
that he delineated in drawings of great beauty and imagination.The vision
is an old and pleasant one, of the city amid public gardens, untroubling of
its surroundings though reliant upon them. Dating from antiquity, this con-
ception was illustrated by Pol Limbourg in his “May” page for the topic the
Trés Riches Heures de Duc de Berry.
Although this picture of Paris around the
year 1416 presents the old ideal—the organic and harmonious vision of
mankind amid nature—the densely clustered beautiful towers rising from
park-like land could have been tendered by many a twentieth-century
architect.
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The benefits of urbanism's intensely rarefied culture shines amid
a benign, and somehow reciprocal, relationship to the land which must sup-
ply the city. This ideal and idealistic, though fundamentally practical rela-
tionship, was considered by Soleri when he anticipated inserting a hugely
dense population into the undisturbed, or otherwise depopulated, country-
side. Soleri visualizes very densely inhabited megastructures dotting the
landscape linked by mag-lev trains.
His drawings and models of such images (minus the then undreamt mag-
levs as regional connectors) were presented as a traveling exhibition in
major American cities in 1970 and brought his ideas widespread notice.
Concurrently, Soleri's 1969 topic
Arcology:The City in the Image of Man
pro-
vided an overview of his aspirations, which might have remained a dream.
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In 1970 Soleri began to build a version of Mesa City, a prototype center
which he called Arcosanti, a community that would eventually have a pop-
ulation of “only” 5,000. In Arizona, 65 miles north of Phoenix and halfway
to Flagstaff, he began Arcosanti as an experiment for a city in the middle of
nowhere, purposefully aloof from other centers, so as to free him and his
collaborators from the pressures of urban land-developers. Within or adja-
cent to an extant city, his slow-moving experiment could never have sur-
vived its infancy.This project, not conceived in the ambitious scale of many
of his drawings, was to serve as a laboratory, mediating between grandiose
self-contained cities, which being theoretical inferred many unanswered
questions, and everyday lived reality for the inhabitants of such gigantic
structures.
His enormously inventive hand-building techniques could be applied to
much larger structures using only moderately more advanced technology.
Set upon a mesa that rises from a 4,000-foot-high desert, this impressive
