AZ City or ZIP
Centennial - Entertainment
  • Type Size: A A A
  • PrintPrint
  • EmailEmail
  • Most PopularMost Popular

Soleri: Architect with a visionary's fervor

There must be something about Arizona that attracts visionary architects who live into their 90s. Frank Lloyd Wright died in 1959 at 91. Paolo Soleri is still alive and working at 92.

Soleri is perhaps more visionary than architect. Few of his projects have been built, but few people have been more acute in their criticism of current political and cultural trends. In fact, Soleri's biggest beef might be said to be with Wright, who envisioned an automobile Utopia he called "Broadacre City," which is the model of an endless suburbia.

Soleri envisions its opposite, a single, self-contained city-in-a-building that presumably would be much greener than the endless lawns and exhaust pipes of urban sprawl.

Soleri's Exhibit A is Arcosanti. Draw a giant X over Arizona and the lines will cross very close to an unfinished group of buildings set on the side of a small ravine near Cordes Junction.

They can be seen from the interstate as you pass by, looking like several sun-white arches out in the desert about 2 miles from the road. These buildings are not unknown. Arcosanti is visited by about 50,000 people every year.

Yet Arcosanti and its creator are often dimly understood by the casual public. Press and public tend to concentrate on the more practical aspects of Soleri's thought and work. It is easier to understand and has immediate importance, especially for those of us who live in the spreading, increasingly unsupportable, suburbanized city of Phoenix.

Soleri has spent his life demonstrating that however it works in the short run, such uncontrolled growth as defines Phoenix cannot work in the long run.

"The American dream exported to the rest of the world will have tragic consequences," he says.

Imagine if 6 billion people all had separate homes with lawns and all drove individual automobiles. We'd quickly run out of space, gasoline, clean air, food and water.

So, Soleri advocates a different kind of living, in highly complex, compact cities, where cars will not be needed.

It is a visionary solution to the problems of overpopulation and global pollution.

But there is more to the strange, oracular architect than his practical vision for a life possible in the future.

And it is this second, equally important self that is seldom mentioned.

For Soleri is more than an architect and more than a social critic. And his ecological vision is based less on its practical effects than on its religious or philosophical significance.

Born in Italy

Soleri was born in Turin, Italy. His family left in 1933 to avoid fascism. Soleri studied architecture in France and later back in Italy.

In 1947, he came to the United States on an 18-month scholarship to study with Wright at Taliesin in Wisconsin and Taliesin West in Scottsdale.

Wright was a visionary, too. But Wright saw the future as endless suburbs. It was a model for urban planning that called for landscaped roadways, tract housing and lots and lots of automobiles and places to park them.

It was an essential vision for postwar America.

In Wright's eye, such communities would be self-sufficient, with each development having its own shopping areas, entertainment centers and civic organization. We would live leisurely and comfortable lives, with lots of greenery and lawns.

Unfortunately, Wright lived to see a distorted nightmare version of his dream play out all across America, from Levittown on Long Island to Pacifica, Calif., with its houses "all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same."

But Soleri saw another way for the future, one that pulled up the suburban sprawl and concentrated it in small places.

"We must build up, not out," he says.

"The problem is the present design of cities only a few stories high, stretching outward in unwieldy sprawl for miles. As a result of their sprawl, they literally transform the Earth, turning farms into parking lots and waste enormous amounts of time and energy transporting people, goods and services over their expanses. My solution is urban implosion rather than explosion."

He said we must combine an ecological sensitivity with architectural innovation. This splicing of disciplines he calls "arcology."

Studies solar energy

Soleri left Wright in 1950 and moved back to Italy, where he began studying solar energy and how it might be used for human habitations. He completed several architectural commissions as well, including a large ceramics factory in Vietri Sul Mare on the coast of Amalfi.

But in 1956, he came back to America and the desert, beginning work on his residence and workplace in Scottsdale, now called Cosanti. When Cosanti was begun, it was a small compound of concrete domes constructed in the middle of the desert. But it didn't take Scottsdale long to spread out, so that now Cosanti is oddly situated in the middle of the suburbia Soleri so mistrusts.

It is out of place there, like a surviving Whole Earth Catalog dream in the middle of red-tile suburban hell. You move from upscale ranch-house ersatz Mediterranean homes to a lot filled with yurts and dugouts.

One thing Soleri learned from Wright that he continues to use is the apprentice program. A group of dedicated people - ranging in age from their 20s to their 50s - works at Cosanti and helps further Soleri's vision for the future.

Bells prove profitable

In the mid '50s, Soleri began making bells. These Soleri Bells, of bronze or clay, have been the main financial support for Soleri and his projects ever since.

And his apprentices work at the foundries of both Cosanti and Arcosanti, pouring about 600 pounds of molten bronze a day into sand molds to make the bells.

It is an impressive sight in the middle of an Arizona summer day to stand under the large arch at Cosanti while a dozen or so men and women in goggles and leather gloves and aprons heat up the metal and construct the molds.

It sounds like they are living next to an airport, with the furnace roaring all morning, turning the bronze into a glowing orange soup. The furnace is underground and the small hole in which the crucible is lowered might as well be a window into hell.

The heat is unbearable.

"Which is worse, the furnace or the sun?" I ask one of the foundry men.

"I think the sun is worse, by a hair," he answers.

In 1970, Soleri began construction on Arcosanti, in Cordes Junction.

It was meant to be a model city for the future, an "arcology" in concrete and steel. When finished, it is meant to house more than 5,000 people in a single compact complex of interrelated buildings concentrated at the center of an 860-acre plot of high desert land.

But it has never come close to being finished. The largest population it has yet sustained is about 100, and it now supports less than 50.

It is a great, unfinished fragment of a dream.

A cosmic vision

But that dream is based on more than practical considerations.

For Arcosanti is part of a cosmic vision Soleri has written about.

It is an eschatology, or philosophy of the end of time. But more than an eschatology, it is a teleology, or a purposeful direction for the end result of time. Soleri's philosophy is a development of that of French theologian Teilhard de Chardin.

For Soleri, the evolution of the universe is the constant movement from disorganization into structure and from polytheism to monotheism. The purpose of all existence, he says, is the creation of God.

We have it backward, he says. God did not create the universe, but rather the universe is in the process of creating God.

Humans have invented the idea of divinity, he says, and "now that God has been invented, he needs to be created."

So, in that sense, Soleri's philosophy is more teleological than eschatological: We are the acorn; God is the tree.

He has written at length on this idea in his book "The Omega Seed" (1981, Anchor Books). In it, he explains how the universe, begun in the Big Bang, was at first an aggregate of unrelated subatomic particles - "10 particle-godlets," he calls them - which began organizing themselves immediately into larger meaningful groups.

Those groups, or atoms, formed molecules, the molecules formed compounds and the compounds formed life. Life, in its turn, formed consciousness.

Consciousness is "reality trying to reveal itself to itself," he says.

Each of these states is a more evolved and more complex organization of matter.

But in the process of complexifying reality, matter has created the non-physical realities of the universe, too. Ideas, for instance, that describe the complex organizings.

This non-material creation of mind he calls logos, the Greek word for language and systematic thought.

Reality, Soleri posits, has two aspects: the present and the past.

But no future.

"The future doesn't exist," he says, "If it did, it would not be the future."

The present occurs in the space-time continuum. It is made up of physical reality in real time. It is also an infinitesimal knife edge of time, which whips by so quickly, you can barely see it.

"The present has no thickness," Soleri explains.

For this constantly moving knife edge of time, he borrows the old Platonic term of "becoming."

It generates the past, which is immutable. We can change what we do in the present, but once it has happened, the past cannot be changed. Hence, for Soleri, it has a permanence that he calls, again borrowing the old terminology, "being."

So, becoming moves like a shark, always going forward and eating up the present, turning it into being, or the past.

The present is physical and temporal. The past is incorporeal and eternal. The past is also logos.

The present is turning what is physically present into what exists almost as a Platonic ideal.

And it is this ideal that the universe is tending toward. In the end, when the whole thing has been turned into being, we will have created God. The Omega god, in which all will exist in eternal form, without the changes of becoming.

Cities effect on mankind

So what, you ask, does all this have to do with city planning?

"A central tenet of arcology is that the city is the necessary instrument for the evolution of humankind," he says.

It is the "urban effect," and it is related to the way all of nature tends to make things happen in interrelated systems. For Soleri, a coral reef is as much an urban phenomenon as New York City.

And it is in cities that the further organization of creation can best occur.

Therefore, better cities help further the evolution of the universe in its mission to create God. Bad cities hinder the evolution.

Can one tiny planet at the edge of a single galaxy have that much influence on the evolution of the cosmos as a whole?

"Well," he admits, "probably it is not that important for the cosmos, but it is very important for us."

We on this planet, he surmises, are likely only one small bit of consciousness in the universe. Elsewhere, there are probably other planets with intelligent life, and all together we are working toward that final end: the creation of God.

A utopian tradition

In the 19th century, America was home to the utopian religious community. There were attempts at making perfect communities at Amana, Iowa; Oneida, N.Y.; New Harmony, Ind.; and at dozens of other places, under the auspices of various religious groups, from Shakers to Inspirationists.

Each attempted to find a better way of living and to make us better human beings. Each did so with the certainty of religious conviction.

Arcosanti, it turns out, is one of the last gasps of that tradition, although Soleri chafes at such a characterization.

"Arcosanti is not a utopia," he argues. "It is only a container."

He is not creating a perfect society, he says, but a place for other people to build a better society.

"I build only the piano. Others will have to write the music."

But in so arguing, Soleri does not seem to recognize the political choice of building a piano instead of, say, a sitar. You cannot play Indian ragas on a piano.

And the theory of Arcosanti allows only certain kinds of societies to grow. In this, Soleri has in fact made the political choices of what kind of society he desires.

Some critics have questioned the value of the kind of society Arcosanti fosters.

A visit to Arcosanti

Up on the dry Agua Fria River, near Sycamore Mesa, Arcosanti sits, perhaps less than a 10th completed. It has apartments for apprentices, a foundry, a ceramics workshop, an auditorium, a swimming pool and even a kind of motel for visitors. There is a cafeteria that serves good food cheaply, and a bakery.

The people working there seem happy. The place is more like a commune than a city, but those working there enjoy quiet, clean air and a night sky full of stars. They work during the day either constructing the next building or making bells. Some work in the cafeteria, others in the bakery.

It is a delightful place to visit. Soleri arranges for concerts and cultural events, most open to the public. And several times a year, important thinkers gather for panel discussions and lectures.

A five-story concrete building at one end of the complex functions as visitor center, eatery and gift shop. A giant, two-ringed arch occupies the central space of the construction and serves as a place for everyone to meet each morning to discuss the business of the day.

A crescent, two-story ring of apartments is the central living area and it circles the auditorium/amphitheater. The concrete gleams in the desert sunlight and the lush landscaping softens the geometric lines of the buildings. Tall, thin European cypress trees make dark vertical lines across the landscape.

Your heart slows down and your brain opens up in such an environment.

But, what seems so peaceful at Arcosanti is that it isn't a city, but a small leftover hippie commune. It is not the bustling self-contained city Soleri envisions. If it ever is completely built, you have to wonder whether it would be as pleasant.

Understanding Paolo

The population of Arcosanti share Soleri's ecological vision, but not all of them buy into his religious vision.

"You have to understand Paolo as many different people," says Kip Hersted, a 50ish foundry worker at Arcosanti.

"He is an artist, an architect, a social critic and a philosopher. Of those, the philosopher is probably the least."

Hersted is stacking bronze pieces fresh from the casting, before they are finished. His neatly trimmed beard is white in the glaring sun.

"And even more important," he says, "you have to remember he is a European artist."

European artists in the past century have felt the need of creating manifestoes for their art. There have been Surrealist manifestoes and Futurist manifestoes and conceptual manifestoes.

"Americans don't seem to feel the need to justify their art with a philosophy," Hersted says. "But Europeans do. And Paolo is like that."

So, despite its elaborate philosophical underpinnings, the best way to appreciate Arcosanti is as art.

And in a century filled with fragmentary art and failed experiments, Soleri has designed a beautiful ruin. You can enjoy its angles, its shadows, its views of the desert.

Soleri insists it is a vision for the future - a future that by his own philosophy does not exist - but more important than that, it is a vision for the present.

Arcosanti's residents live a better life now, not in the future. They are connected with the planet, they work hard and at the end of the day, they can point to what they have made, unlike so many of America's corporate workers, who shuffle paper or crunch computer keyboards and at the end of the day, they don't really know what they have done.

"It's good to be able to point," says David Koppe, one of the foundry workers at Cosanti. There is a physicality and nowness to their lives that generates satisfaction.

And if nothing of his vision pans out in the future, it is hard not to agree with at least this much of his plan:

"What the world is doing is not working," he says. "Why not try a different form?"

Reach the reporter at or 602-444-8823.

  • Type Size: A A A
  • PrintPrint
  • EmailEmail
  • Most PopularMost Popular

Paolo Soleri harlie Leight/The Arizona Republic

Italian-born architect and futurist Paolo Soleri.

Get anywhere

free articles remaining this month.

We hope you have enjoyed your complimentary access.

Become a subscriber today to enjoy these benefits:

View subscription options
