Roadside Attraction: Arcosanti---Shadows Over Utopia

We interrupt our regularly scheduled, nonessential programming about mid-century architecture and old cars to mention that World Central Kitchen is now serving refugees from the war in Ukraine as well as the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. We've also heard good things about the International Rescue Committee doing a similar job; both organizations have accepted our humble donations...

When architect Paolo Soleri launched construction of Arcosanti, his model city in the Arizona desert back in 1970, the idea was to offer a self-sufficient, environmentally-sound alternative to suburban sprawl.  At the core of Soleri's arcology (a fusion of architecture and ecology) were the ideas of high density and megastructure, where a city could be housed in a single building.  The city-in-building concept had gotten a boost from Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City in Chicago in the early Sixties, with offices, stores, restaurants, marina, dwellings and a movie theater in a riverfront high-rise complex that would, if you lived and worked there, allow you to mostly ignore the weather outside. The megastructure idea became fashionable in this era, with architecture magazines giving lots of space to the unbuilt urban proposals of London's Archigram group and the Japanese Metabolist movement.  Soleri's goal for Arcosanti, situated about 70 miles north of Phoenix, was to house as many as 5,000 people in a single structure, and to build towards a density exceeding that of the world's most densely-populated cities.  The master plan model above shows how this megastructure was intended to look. The dark gray structures arrayed along the base of the looming light gray megastructure shows what has actually been constructed.

When I visited Arcosanti on Memorial Day weekend just over a decade ago, it looked much like the photo above, with construction proceeding at a very slow pace, and a few dozen people living and working either on construction or in the casting of bronze bells, the business Soleri had selected as a fund-raising mechanism for his dream project. Structures step down the hillside, with simple guest rooms at the base.  Heroic vaults and a half-dome had been built in concrete...

        

Close to the top of the incline, above the guest rooms and utilitarian spaces, the Arcosanti team had built the vaults shown above, along with rectilinear structures containing Soleri's design studio, a half dome known as the Arcosanti Apse to shelter the foundry for casting the bells, a dining hall, and guest apartments with commanding views of the landscape.  There was also a semicircular amphitheater space...

                        

Working and dwelling spaces with large circular openings in concrete are deployed in an arc around the steps of this amphitheater. The steel reinforcing projecting from the cantilevered concrete beams hints at an intended link to planned additions, but the pace of construction would seem to position any completion date deep into the future. What happened to this idea of an experimental city, and how did it get delayed, if not derailed altogether?  We need to go back over a hundred years...

Born in Turin, Italy in 1919, Paolo Soleri was awarded a masters degree in architecture from the Turin Polytechnic in 1946 and journeyed to the US in December of that year. Once there, he spent eighteen months studying under Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West* as well as at Taliesin in Spring Green. The Taliesin West experience influenced Soleri in his selection of a location for his urban experiment, and probably in his approach to education; Soleri taught architecture at Arizona State University. His approach to visual form, however, may owe as much to Italian modernism as what he learned (or taught) in Arizona. There is the romantic use of classical forms (those vaults, that dome) for their own sake…after all, there's nothing in the nature of a dome that makes it a good foundry space.  And these cubes, semicircles and circles are deployed at Arcosanti without regard to patterns of sun or shade, in a way that Italian Futurists might have deployed them in the decade before Soleri was born.

As San Francisco Mark English pointed out in his perceptive analysis*, many of the failings of Arcosanti proceed from the original one: failure to select the right site.  Though Arcosanti was intended to be self-sufficient, it sits above a seasonal creek that, even before the present mega-drought, was dry half the year, so no food is grown on site.  Add to that the fact that Soleri did not seek out land forms which might provide natural shade, unlike, for example, the native tribes who built their houses into cliffs above arable land.  The buildings face south across the big ravine, with few integrated or applied sun-shading devices.  Failure to use native, drought-tolerant plants in the landscape design was another example of inattention to the specifics of site.  

A few years after Soleri died at age 93, his daughter Daniela published an account of his abusive behavior as a parent, which included sexual abuse, and of his toxic relationships to women working at Arcosanti.  She noted that her complaints during her adolescence were ignored by adults working there. Somehow it is less shocking than it should be that an architect with visions of remaking cities according to his vision should fail so spectacularly to get his own house in order.  It seems to fit a pattern of mankind in general, and of men specifically, that we often turn our attention to remaking the world before even attempting the task of remaking ourselves...

So the stillborn city at Arcosanti may have been born of a kind of hubris, which led to choosing the wrong place to demonstrate an idea, and then choosing the wrong forms and details to make the idea work, all the while ignoring a much more immediate problem: recognizing the rights of everyone, including women and children, on the way to this imagined utopia, still shimmering like a mirage in the desert heat...

Errata:   Apologies to anyone who tried to read the original version of this post, which was riddled with typos, especially in the last paragraph...perhaps the result of inadequate caffeine or caffeine substitute (i.e. sleep).  If readers had actually paid for this work, we'd be offering a refund...

*Footnote:  For a more detailed critique of the site design, architectural form and landscape at Arcosanti, we recommend the post by San Francisco architect Mark English at thearchitectstake.com.  It's entitled "Arcosanti Design Critique." For a visual survey of another Arizona project by a utopian architect, you might want to check out "Roadside Attraction: Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West, and the Taliesin Vehicle Fleet", posted here on January 22, 2022.  We surveyed other proposals for utopian cities in "Cities Under Glass: the Dream of Domed Cities" on March 18, 2018.

Monochrome Photo Credit (master plan model):  archdaily.com

Color Photo Credits:  

Second from top (overall view):  Wikimedia

All other color photos:  The author.