Arcosanti

Located in the semiarid desert region of central Arizona in the United States, about 70 miles north of Phoenix, Arcosanti, when complete, will be a small town of around 7,000 people on about 25 acres of an approximately 4,060-acre land preserve. Since construction work began in 1970, its founder, the Italianborn architect Paolo Soleri (b. 1919), and a dedicated community of volunteers have designed, built, and inhabited Arcosanti as an urban laboratory. As the main project of the not-for-profit Cosanti Foundation, Arcosanti is devoted to research into and development of a different kind of urban environment.

In opposition to urban sprawl, Soleri has proposed highly integrated, compact, car-free cities in which walking would be the main form of transportation. He calls these environments arcologies, because they fuse architecture with ecology. Inspired by the point Omega hypothesis, a theory of spiritual evolution put forward by the priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), Soleri believes that arcologies can be instrumental in our human evolution. Within an arcology, material recycling, waste reduction, energy conservation, and the use of renewable energy sources would be the basis of sustainable urban production and consumption. The drawing together of diverse city functions into mixed-use, selfcontained arcologies would encourage cultural intensification and social integration within their boundaries and would permit the surrounding hinterland to remain natural. Soleri also believes that by adopting a more frugal lifestyle inside an arcology, citizens would have the potential not only to do less harm to the planet but also to develop themselves spiritually.

Arcosanti is the name given by Soleri to the thirtieth arcology for which Soleri produced designs, published in 1969 in Arcology: The City in the Image of Man.

Arcosanti was designed to be an experimental complex providing a testing ground for arcological concepts. Like arcology, “Arcosanti” is a fused word of Italian origin. “Arco” refers to architecture (or the arch), “cosa” is a widely used word meaning “thing,” and the annex “nti” suggests a certain permanence of timeless quality. Together the name suggests a non-material (or spiritual) process at the heart of architecture—an “architecture before things.”

While following in the tradition of the 1960s counterculture communes and the more recent ecovillages movement, the community at Arcosanti is unique in that its motivation lies primarily in the production of ecological architecture. The community has focused on building the project's various concrete structures using an earth-casting construction method based on ancient techniques. These structures and spaces, many characterized by the apse form, are built into the south-facing edge of a mesa above the Agua Fria River. They now define the living, working, and learning processes of around one hundred residents. In addition to their ongoing construction work, residents are involved in such diverse tasks as project development, research activity, exhibitions, drafting and design work, conference organization, wind-bell production, and site maintenance.

Arcosanti lacks the levels of economic investment and skilled labor that would have seen it finished long ago, but the community remains intact, the work continues, and Soleri's determination to build remains undiminished. His experience as an apprentice of architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1961) at Taliesin between 1947 and 1948 undoubtedly influenced his establishment of an educational program that has brought more than 3,000 volunteers from around the world to participate in construction workshops and seminars within this experimental learning-by-building laboratory at Arcosanti.

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