Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
experiment in community dynamics, construction technique, and urban
socialization, Arcosanti is itself a commanding sculptural presence striving
toward an organic inner life to match its shell. The urge toward a natural
systemic, sustainable and vital, was noted by Naomi Bloom in the March
1991 issue of
Science Digest:
“Paolo Soleri is an architect who designs cities
the way nature designs the Universe.”Yet the form did not recall bygone
pastoral ideals. More than one skeptical visitor recognized that “amid the
tumbleweed and cactus, a futuristic space colony materializes in the
desert.”
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The unquestionable aridity of the spectacle in its wilderness set-
ting imparts a science-fiction flavor advertently or inadvertently associated
with megastructures—they seem part of somebody's future. Like other cap-
tivating accoutrements of science fiction, we are not sure how to acquire
these artifacts, which, nevertheless, seem appealing, but only for somebody
else at the moment. (Before they were achieved, cities must have been
talked about and wondrously described by storytellers sitting around the
campfire, just as movies today show future megastructures. The narrative
association is both a curse and a blessing; a blessing because even non-
theoreticians understand what a megastructure is while some theorists sniff
at a pop-culture idea, and the population is terrified, not by Soleri but, by
the vulgar presentations of these unified cities which serve as the backdrop
for horror stories.)
When completed,Arcosanti may house its 5,000 people in a dwelling 25
stories high, surrounded by light and air, set in 14 cultivated acres amid an
860-acre tract of greenbelt.The work, by unpaid students, proceeds slowly;
today the project is not nearly done and is partially financed by the sale of
the ceramic and copper wind bells Soleri produces and by the tuition of
students and advanced professional architects who come to Arcosanti to
apprentice with Soleri for short periods. They, along with many theorists,
architects, and enthusiasts around the world share his salvific notion of how
the city must change or perish. (See Soleri's expression of his vision at the
end of this essay.)
An alternative way to frame the question of the cause of the death of
cities assumes their fundamental viability and people's deep attachment to
them as an idea and way of life, and, though counterpoised to Soleri's ideas,
this alternative arrives at a solution oddly hospitable to Soleri's. This is the
proposal by the Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser.
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Born in Vienna on December 28, 1928, of a Jewish mother and an
“Aryan” father, Hundertwasser barely survived the Hitler period in which
