 Photo/John Trott/Cosanti Foundation |
Arcosanti, a Habitat for HumanityBy John Monczunski Traffic surges up Interstate 17 a mile a minute. Cars, vans, semis, pickups and buses hop and bop through this urbanized chunk of the Sonoran Desert. We've got to get out of Phoenix, if it's the last thing we ever do. But every time I glance at the rearview mirror, the city is still there. Malls, subdivisions and more malls and more subdivisions wrap around the city's core, layer upon paved layer. |
It should come as no surprise that it's hard to get out of town. From 1970 to 1990 the Phoenix metro area doubled in size and is now actually larger than Los Angeles. The city's rapacious development has been destroying desert wilderness at the rate of an acre an hour, earning it a "dishonorable mention" in the Sierra Club's 1998 report on urban sprawl.
Phoenix, of course, is hardly unique. Cities have been gnawing voraciously on rural America for at least 50 years. Bulldozers chomp at it, spitting out a steady stream of parking lots, strip malls and cul-de-sacs lined with aluminum-columned imitations of Tara. From 1970 to 1990 more than 19 million acres of rural land were urbanized. Today the American Farmland Trust warns that 70 percent of prime or unique farmland lies in the path of development. Like tree rings, the vital growing edge of the city moves farther and farther from a hollowing core. The pace has been astonishing. When I tell my daughters there were farms less than two miles from my boyhood home on the northwest side of Chicago, they give me one of those "Yeah, right, Dad" looks. But I protest, "No, no. There were whole blocks filled with empty lots, 'prairies' we called them back then."
They had names like The Orange Jungle (named after Orange Avenue lined with empty lots) and The Hugabug Jungle (a tribute to its fauna). These were ragweed-infested places, filled with monarch butterflies, enough black-and-green garter snakes to make Saint Patrick shake his crosier till the next millennium, and enough bulbous yellow "banana" spiders to give a kid nightmares halfway through puberty. Chicago -- at least that part of Chicago -- was wilderness back then.
But it didn't last. All those empty blocks soon filled in with neat little brick bungalows, Cape Cods, ranches and three-flat apartment buildings. It's a solid city neighborhood today. The transformation has been so complete that my daughters now roll their eyes at the suggestion that it was ever anything but brick-and-pavement city.
The new frontier -- where cul-de-sac meets cornfield -- resides 40 miles to the west. The urban grid now flops across most of northern Illinois. Chicagoland, as the natives call it, extends from northern Indiana to Wisconsin and halfway to Iowa. In just six years, from 1990 to 1996, the metropolitan area grew 40 percent while population increased just 9 percent. And the bulldozers keep pushing.
* * *
Forty miles north of Phoenix at a scenic overlook I step out of the rental car to stretch my legs. The desert sprawls before me, a vast carpet of rust, ochre and gray-green. The vista is magnificent and, at last, the city is nowhere in view. Out of sight, maybe, but not out of mind. The air here stinks. The acrid ozoned breath of Phoenix has drifted north and now assaults me with a roundhouse right to the nose. You can flee the city, but apparently you can't yet get away.
I drive deeper and higher into the desert. The outstretched arms of saguaro cacti, some as tall as 30 feet, give way to low-lying prickly pear cactus and cholla. Mile after dusty mile falls away as the radio sings golden oldies. At one point a newscaster interrupts the music with a story about a U.S. trade mission to China. The Chinese government is eager for U.S. business and wants to cut a deal. Meanwhile General Motors wants to open assembly plants in China. As I pass a slow-moving semi, I idly wonder what the world will be like at rush hour in the year 2050, when a billion Chinese are creeping bumper-to-bumper in their Chevy Blazers on the Peking-Hong Kong Freeway.
The American Dream sets the standard and stokes the world's lust for things. Everyone wants as much stuff as they can get -- and big houses to hold all that stuff. When my brother-in-law, Joe, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, one of the poorest countries in Africa, his friends in the village pressed him for details about life in the United States. "They would have given anything to have a Wal-Mart," Joe recalls. While recognizing their real need and desire to raise the standard of living, he was surprised by his own ambivalence. When he looked at the close-knit village community, he says, he sometimes wondered if it was worth it. "I'd think, 'You just don't know. In some ways you have it so much better.'"
His ambivalence points to important questions: Just what is progress? What do we really require for a humane life? What form should our cities take to provide that humane life? Is there a better way?
* * *
Twenty miles up the road on the right, a yellow slash cuts through the desert halfway to the horizon. The distant stripe -- actually a construction site fence -- marks both my destination and one answer -- if not the answer -- to the Mali questions.
At the Cordes Junction exit, I peel off from the stream flowing north to Flagstaff and Beyond. I drive past a McDonald's, then turn left at a gas station/sandwich shop. Before me, at the side of the road, a small blue rectangle reads "Arcosanti." An arrow beneath the strange word points up, inviting the curious down a gravel road.
I shove the car in gear and bounce along two miles of ruts and potholes that circle through the desert in a broad arc, ending finally in a small visitors parking lot. The view from this spot is . . . well . . . unimpressive. A construction crane, heavy equipment and supplies sit behind the yellow fence, reminders that this place is and has been a "work in progress" for nearly 30 years. Beyond the equipment lie the curved and hard-angled backsides of some undeniably unusual structures.
To get a truer picture of the place -- the picture postcard view -- one must see it from the opposing mesa. From that vantage point Arcosanti reveals itself as an array of 12 buildings that bear a striking resemblance to a string of Soleri windbells. This is no coincidence, really, since both the renowned decorative bells and Arcosanti are the brainchildren of the Italian architect and artist Paolo Soleri.
Soleri came to the United States in 1947 after receiving a Ph.D. in architecture from the Torino Polytechnico in Turin, Italy. He studied under Frank Lloyd Wright at the renowned architect's design studios Taliesin East in Wisconsin and Taliesin West in Arizona. In 1950 he returned to Italy, where he'd been commissioned to build a ceramics factory. The experience proved to be pivotal. The job taught him the processes of the ceramics industry that he would employ in his award-winning windbell designs. He also learned the construction technique of silt-cast concrete, which he would later use at Arcosanti.
Soleri moved back to Arizona in 1956 and with his wife, Colly, established the Cosanti Foundation, a not-for-profit educational organization to advance his urban-planning theory. In 1970, ground was broken for the first Arcosanti building.
The place could pass for a college campus or some type of monastery. But Arcosanti, which derives its name from the Italian word for "before things," is an urban laboratory, a crucible to test Soleri's ideas. For the past 30 years he has been preaching and building the gospel of "arcology" here in the desert -- sometimes to packed assemblies, other times to empty pews. He coined the term to describe an architecture shaped by ecology, one that produces a lean and keen urbanism that is efficient, frugal and sensitive to the environment.
His buildings are cunningly designed to make the most of the sun-filled desert climate. The apse, or half-dome, and vault are recurring structural motifs. In the summer, they provide shade from the high-riding sun. In winter the sun's rays penetrate the interior with warmth. Soleri makes extensive use of greenhouses for food production and solar heat collection. The curved sides of some of the later buildings will be edged in dense greenery, a vertically terraced forest shading the buildings and making them look like hillsides.
The first phase of the complex, known as AOld Town,@ is anchored by a six-story, fortress-like visitors center that includes a restaurant, bakery, gallery and gift shop stocked with Soleri bells and books and Arcosanti souvenirs, all of which help underwrite construction costs. Appropriately, two large bell-like apses house the foundry and ceramics workshop where the bronze and ceramic windbells are fabricated.
Among the other Old Town structures are an amphitheater, greenhouse and swooping and straight buildings that house offices and living quarters ranging from three-bedroom apartments to tiny 8-by-8 dormitory rooms. At any given time, about 100 people work on the project and live here. Of that number, 50 to 70 are student volunteers who pay $800 for the privilege of spending five weeks in seminars and hands-on construction. Since 1970 more than 4,000 people ages 18 to 80 have participated in the working seminars.
As imposing as the view from the mesa may be, it is a shadow of what is intended. When completed -- some, acknowledging the tortoise-like pace of construction, would say if completed -- Arcosanti will become a small but densely populated community of 7,000. Homes, work places, cultural centers and service facilities will be scattered through a cluster of small and large buildings that will cover just 30 of the 4,000 acres in the Arcosanti wilderness preserve. That plan means two things: First, unlike most of urban America, residents of Arcosanti won't be cut off from the country; nature literally will be right out the back door. Second, unlike most of urban America, there will be no bumper-to-bumper, full-metal-jacket auto combat here. The only traffic hopping and bopping through Arcosanti will be on two legs. Everything -- work, shopping, entertainment, restaurants -- is to be within walking distance of everything else.
Soleri's desert town-in-the-making is more akin to the walled cities of antiquity than the ever-expanding amoeba-like megacities of today. It's a modern attempt to revive the pre-automobile urban form of a compact, dense city floating in the countryside.
The architectural establishment has never quite known what to make of Soleri. He was named an honorary fellow of the British Royal Institute of Architects in 1996, has received numerous awards, including a gold medal from the American Institute of Architects and the silver medal of France's Academie d= Architecture, and also is a distinguished lecturer in the College of Architecture at Arizona State University. But he remains very much the outsider.
One reason is his approach -- the grand project -- which is out of favor today. "Soleri represents a kind of sweeping solution to a problem that was popular at one time," observes Notre Dame Assistant Professor of Architecture Rev. Richard Bullene, CSC. "Now the thrust in urban planning is toward discrete interventions in real cities, smaller-scale projects with a long-range vision." As one man's work of art rather than a project shaped by the conflicting interests in a real city, the project is viewed by some as less relevant.
Notre Dame historian of architecture Dennis Doordan, however, believes that Soleri continues to plays a useful role "You could say that his utopian urban scheme is one of the many 'Yesterday's Tomorrows' that never made it. Yet he's still out there doing his stuff. He is not some historical relic. His role today is as it always was: provocation, forcing the mainstream to rethink assumptions. It is and always has been countercultural, an attempt to demonstrate an alternative. Literally, Soleri is the prophet out in the desert."
* * *
Soleri has agreed to see me, but when I arrive at his office he is not in. He is expecting me, I am assured, and an assistant phones his residence. The architectural critic Peter Banham says Soleri "looks ascetic enough to be an early Renaissance John the Baptist, even in frayed blue shorts and a stone mason's grubby singlet." It is an apt description for an architectural prophet.
A few minutes after the assistant places the call, a slight man with a shock of wavy gray hair, dressed in a white short-sleeve shirt and tan pants nimbly descends a ship's ladder through an opening in the ceiling. The 79-year-old architect, who could pass for 59, has a quick-and-easy commute even by Arcosanti standards. His apartment sits right above the administrative offices.
We exchange pleasantries and in passing I mention the newscast about China. This, it turns out, is more than small talk. It goes to the heart of Soleri's thought and he seizes on the comment. "I was flying above China about two years ago, over an area that was mainly plains, flat land," he says in a soft voice dry as Arizona dust. "From the air I could see the pattern was one of villages surrounded by farmland. Such an arrangement makes a subsistence economy possible. But the pattern of development we export and that which the Chinese government welcomes and pursues [consumerism, modern urbanization] will inevitably change that pattern for the worse.
"
Farmland will disappear," he predicts. "The villages which are now subsistence societies will take on the aspect of Phoenix or Los Angeles. The land will be taken over by urbanization -- suburbia, exurbia. The implications for China and the world are profound."Soleri believes cities are the key to what ails us. He argues that environmental degradation and the resulting social problems all can be traced back to urban patterns that mandate waste. "The American Dream of a large house in the suburbs has been too successful," he says. "We've gotten too good at creating the good life -- a consumerist version of the good life that is as seductive as it is wasteful."
Soleri believes current urbanization forms are courting disaster especially as they spread throughout the undeveloped world. He points out that the world=s population is expected to double to 10 billion people by the year 2050. At current rates of consumption, it would take the resources of 40 earths to raise the rest of the world to the American standard. "The American Dream of single-family housing must be abandoned in favor of something that is coherent with human and biospheric reality," he says. "Unfortunately, we are on the wrong path, and the longer one stays on the wrong path the wronger one becomes."
There are those who argue there are no visionaries today. Everyone is chained to short-term thinking. CEOs live and die by the next quarter's profits and elected officials live and die by the issues that will win the next election. Consequently, the Big Picture never develops. And so we lurch into the future, one foot dangling over the precipice, the other poised for the next step.
While Soleri has his share of detractors -- his urban vision is unrealistic, they grumble, and his designs are dated -- no one has ever accused him of overlooking the Big Picture. But please don't call him "visionary." When the "v" word comes up, he bristles ever so politely, "I am a realist," he says. That may be, but his realism is grounded in lofty idealistic theory influenced by the French Jesuit theologian and anthropologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
A popular bumper sticker urges tailgating motorists to "Think Globally and Act Locally," but Soleri cranks that up a notch. "We must realize that we are part of something bigger than ourselves and act in accord with that," he says. "We are cosmic stuff, and unless we are clear on that we are bound for problems. We must stop taking the small view of things. The larger view needn't be sacrificial. It can be a most incredible leap into something really very exciting."
For both Soleri and Teilhard, evolution is the driving force pushing consciousness to greater levels of awareness. As organisms evolve, they become more complex and compact, greater amounts of information are contained in smaller, more efficient vessels. The Italian architect asserts that the city, too, is an organism and therefore subject to the same laws of evolution. "It should become a more lively container for the social, cultural and spiritual evolution of [humankind]," he says.
Soleri believes further that cities are essential to humanity's continued evolution because they are "the crucibles of [this] complexifying process at the collective level of consciousness." Simply put, cities are like pressure cookers of thought and creativity. An urban environment that enhances and encourages interaction among people is bound to raise the consciousness of humanity. "It's very clear that life is not an explosion of things, but an implosion," he says.
While Chardin would agree, Soleri's other mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright, surely would beg to differ. On the issue of cities, master and disciple went their separate ways. Whereas Soleri's ideal is an intense, dense place, Wright believed the best city was no city. His ideal was Broadacre City, an ultra-low-density rural non-city city. (Once when asked where he would build a house Wright replied, "I'd build it as far from the city as I could, then I'd double the distance.")
Lately, Soleri has been fretting more about the non-city city. Specifically, he's concerned about the effect cyberspace may have on urban space. "We may evolve into a planetary hermitage where people are totally separate from one another," he says. "All the gadgets will keep us in touch with other people's brains but not the people themselves.
"
I think it would be terrible because we are fundamentally vicarious creatures," he says softly. "We need each other in every way, not just as a voice in a box. One day there may be real silicon intelligence, but for the moment we are very much flesh, bone and passions." Real people need real cities.Above all, Soleri believes his urban experiment should be a place "where the ordinary routine of life is surrounded by the extraordinary. The aim is town as learner, composer and performer." Of Arcosanti, he has written that it should have "its ear to the ground physically, theologically and aesthetically. It should therefore be able to generate in religious people, art people and media people a passion for grace and expression."
The principles underlying Arcosanti are universally applicable, but Soleri is adamantly opposed to a cookie-cutter approach to urban problem-solving. "I wouldn't want to see Arcosanti replicated elsewhere in terms of physical appearance," he says.
If Arcosanti were to have been built in Minnesota, Soleri declares, "It would be very different from this place, even if I were to design it. An awareness of the peculiar physical climate would determine much of the design. I don't want to impose my music on you." He smiles. "You take something from me and play your own music."
The next movement in his desert symphony is Arcosanti Critical Mass, the code name for the jump from a construction camp of 100 to a small town of 500. It is an ambitious leap that some observers have estimated will cost $250 million or more. With an annual construction budget of $200,000 provided by bell sales, Soleri's book royalties, speaking fees and working seminars, the step is daunting. There is so much to build.
Among the buildings planned are a conference center named the Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Cloister, in homage to the source of his theoretical inspiration; the West Crescent Complex for 200 guests; the Pizza Piazza, a large apse housing greenhouses, residences, ceramics studio and foundry, so-named because of its pizza wedge-shaped canopy; the Via Deliziosa, the paved successor to the rutted gravel entrance drive -- it will be an ever-changing work of art on the theme of endangered species and be painted and designed by a variety of artists; the Minds for History Institute composed of a 500-person auditorium, galleries, seminar rooms, library and offices; La Loggia, a four-story guest house; and the Energy Apron, a series of food and solar heat greenhouses terraced along Arcosant's slope.
The excruciatingly slow pace has frustrated Soleri. Nearly 80, he knows he is unlikely
to see the fully realized Arcosanti, nor even Arcosanti Critical Mass. When he began the
project, back in 1970, he was convinced it would be completed within 10 years. Workers,
reporters and camera crews flocked to the desert construction site during the Energy
Crisis years, when block-long lines of cars would queue up for a fill-up and power
companies pleaded with customers in the name of conservation to refrain from hanging
outdoor Christmas lights. But as Soleri's
administrative assistant Lori Carroll points out "The
boom years of the '80s and '90s intervened and people
lost interest in an old man preaching
frugality in the desert."
Of course, that was then; this is now. With a future that sometimes looks dicey, it may be that Arcosanti's time has come and gone . . . and come again.
Solari windbells studio
Photo/Ivan Pintar, Cosanti Foundation