Arcosanti

“‘Form follows function’ is a planetary lie.”

—Paolo Soleri

 In a Rolling Stone feature on the architect Paolo Soleri, Thomas Albright describes architecture as a compromise between prostitution and dictatorship, between developers plying drafts to bidders and visionaries plying societies by their schemes. Arcosanti welds Soleri to the latter. Arcosanti is a city planned in an unwieldy book (fourteen inches tall and forty-eight inches opened) titled Arcology: The City in the Image of Man. “Arcology” denotes a blend of architecture and ecology for dense, low-impact human habitation. 

The book begins with the epigraph: “This book is about miniaturization.” Arteries and breath span the distance between oxygen and blood, mouths and food between sweat and waste, people between thoughts and things. The city is a contraction of this distance, or it is a death knell. For Soleri, an architect who prioritizes forms above the systems of movement between them is sure to build what is eventually quaint or ruined. Energy is the stuff of cities, the cause for their boom and ruin; the static is secondary. As neural pathways iterate a compact matrix in the brain, so does life in Soleri’s Arcosanti. Practically, this means that no commute exceeds five minutes. Automotive forms alienate life from itself. To compress within these—greener cars or cleaner sprawl—is to wreak “a better form of wrongness.” While Soleri’s terms are baldly neologistic and benignly futurist, his aim is clear: shelter which precludes ruin—life unsevered from its land.

This is unremarkable with a half-century of hindsight. However airy Soleri’s idea of meaningful life may be, it is not to be found in a suburb. It is his distinction to have wrested the dream from the page in Arcosanti, a utopian city in a 4,000-acre land preserve 3,700 feet high. It spans a deliberate and mere 15 acres. It bears in equal measure the hardscaped communal arteries of an Italian hill town and Soleri’s ex-mentor Frank Lloyd Wright’s clear meld of inner and outside. For years I could make nothing of it, the practiced rigor of this curving and jutting mass of concrete and cypress. The gall to build paradise upon a lava-rock mesa 70 miles north of Phoenix. About 150 volunteers broke ground during a five-week construction workshop in 1970; 8,000 have since. Newsweek declared it “the most important experiment undertaken in our lifetime.” Soleri cast concrete from silt—a city hewn from its land. 

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Soleri was born in 1919. In 1946, he earned a Ph.D. at Turin Polytechnic. After World War II, he apprenticed himself to the architect Frank Lloyd Wright at Wright’s Arizona desert laboratory, Taliesin West. Post-war anti-urbanism surprised Soleri, given that civilization was urbanization, a movement from the tribal to the metropolitan. No American city was urban in this sense, dependent upon expansive isolation as they were. Soleri was Wright’s most critically outspoken student during his time at Taliesin. Wright’s Broadacre City was the final horror. The proto-suburban utopia planned the freedom afforded by the car to metastatic extremes. In the blueprint, pedestrians wandered paved and listless one-acre plots. For Soleri, this was no freedom at all. The very form of suburbia barred the life which cities reared. Accordingly, the obdurate Wright ousted Soleri by 1949.

He found a patron—Nora Woods—and planned for her a dome of rocks and war surplus. He stripped to his skivvies and built it. Woods’ daughter Colly visited; she married Soleri by year’s end. In 1956, they bought five tumbledown acres in Scottsdale and christened it Cosanti, meaning “before form.” He worked there for the rest of his life, drafting butcher paper and selling bells. His plans drew notice. The architecture critic Ada Huxtable called them “some of the most spectacularly sensitive and superbly visionary drawings that any century has known.” Disciples flocked. The Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., exhibited his work in 1970; a hundred thousand people came to visit over two months. He made lecture circuits in the fashion of a less messianic Buckminster Fuller. Soleri insisted that this architect, preaching a limitless and cultureless world, reduced his votaries to “naked apes.” If life was to be both meaningful and civil, frugality was to generate form and culture to relate to its inhabitants.

Soleri published Arcology in 1969. The art historian Sibyl Moholy-Nagy said that it “touched every aspect of human existence, defying summation.” The pop artist Peter Blake had “never seen a book on architecture or urban design that bothered [him] as much as this one.” Soleri used the analogy of an elephant and a mouse: though one is 10,000 times larger, it uses 1,000 times the energy. A form should not be conceived in terms of its units but its function. In the book, there are thirty plans, from Arcosanti I (population 1,500; seven acres) to Babelnoah (population six million, 18,000 acres). The World Trade Center would not have pillared it. Life set one mile high renders the car ridiculous; it has nowhere to go. Nor does density bar the unmarred open: a city compressed to Soleri’s degree alone yields wilderness so close at hand.

There is a consciousness which density rears. Soleri called it the noosphere, a human planetary force distinguished from biological processes by its cognitive character. He borrowed from the Jesuit priest and scientist Teilhard du Chardin: in all the world, intelligence alone resists entropy. As communication spreads, it compresses toward an “omega point.” This represents a universal unification; for Teilhard, God. For Soleri, religion is religare—bonding on the subatomic and social scale—or an alienating substitute. The rational transcending of form is the condition of a meaningful life. Mind and matter don’t oppose but co-mingle. Organization is consciousness. It is an essentially urban phenomenon. Soleri urged, half-glib, half-grave: “Work hard, play hard, Teilhard.”

He intended to house 5,000 people; there are currently eighty. Ground broke in 1970. Volunteers attending construction workshops first built a psychedelic Hooverville at the base of the hill where the city stands, a brute smattering of eight by eight foot cubes now joined by yurts and commons. Then the vaults. Each arches sixty feet toward the other from north and south. Vertebral windchimes hang. Then two pneumatic apses; one is a ceramic studio, the other a foundry. Bell sales fund the city. For a half-century, yippies in wifebeaters and Carhartt trousers have sanded and leveled, welded and poured. Colly ran the town. She died in 1982. Soleri, now beside her, had tucked her in a grave visible from his studio. He built an amphitheater in her name. 

More housing was built as more people came, then a craft building, archives, and commons. A 75-foot pool. Soleri swam daily. At his Scottsdale studio, Cosanti, he built its twin, canopied with cast concrete and telephone poles. Soon, visitors came not to build but to study the place. As the late-seventies ecological hangover relegated to eighties science-fiction, the population lapsed to twenty-five. With the environmentalist resurgence of the nineties, it grew larger and more transient. Building resumed; upward, not out.

Through it all was the running meld of organic architecture. High complexity need not call for high technology. There is no central air or heating. Buildings form an apse-effect, whereby the quarter-sphere of an apse creates a microclimate allowing year-round outdoor work. The shades curve in summer when the sun molders high. The bowl sears in winter when the low sun floods the blowing winds. Furnace exhaust heats through concrete sinks, greenhouse air through duct tunnels. A skylight lines the studio lab. It was the slated gate to Arcosanti; visitors would come through a vaguely Biblical bazaar of welders, carpenters, and merchants and out to open land and air: compression and release (again, Wright’s terms). 

Basalt insulates and cools Arcosanti. It allowed for simultaneous construction (no need for broad footing) and left arable land as far as the eye could see. All of life which a city can offer is a few minutes’ reach, and nearly just as near—a mile, a half, a quarter—is earth on which none have left a living trace. But here, around, a stretch of green. It is both bone-dry and densely verdant. Tenders work with the elders of a local Hopi tribe to flood-irrigate dry corn. The farm is predictably organic: rye crops choke weeds and bar bugs. Mesquite sprawls, as impervious to the elements as green life can be. Gaps are hedged with paulownia, the quickest-growing hardwood in the world. Olive, fig, and cypress line the paths and cool the people, earth, and air. The olives are picked each fall and pressed into oil at a nearby mill. Through the whole, a frail but self-held play of heat and density. 

As the forms seem to be outcrops of the land around, the land seems to take up the form. Here, too, Wright’s influence is clear: even in his mildest houses, the Usonians, he dropped glass walls into flower beds. The outside turns into one’s dwelling, and one’s dwelling turns toward the land. Native plants range and scrub; wall- and sloped-roof-gardens warm, waft, and sweeten the air within. Soleri recognized that built form serves the constant need of flesh; there is no better model than the “life-giving and cleansing” matrix of arteries and veins. He insisted that we need only “leave the land to do what it must do to nourish us all.” But these are plains flat enough to scrape and dry enough to starve without the most neurotic of farmers. Arcosanti receives fifteen inches of annual rain; a desert by any other name would be just as dry. The fields are soused in purified greywater. 

There are no cars, and thus no roads or streets. They bar civic life. The suburbs are not, for Soleri as they were for Wright, a matter of architecture but of storage; a freedom of stasis between units, cars, and cubicles. Half of the average American city’s infrastructure is devoted to the car: parking garages, lots, arterial roads, grids, home garages. Community becomes a matter of outcome and sprawl. The poorest are kept to privation tolerable enough to ignore, the richest, to consumption autonomous enough to hide. Human communication without human presence is, for Soleri, a catastrophic fact. In a pedestrian city, community becomes the becoming itself, a continually and collectively iterative conversation. Space and time compress, cooperation inflames. One imagines that eighty people under what is effectively one roof learn nothing more rapidly than conflict resolution. 

Arcosanti is still bone-worn curves and bare earth, still the bright dazed glint and chime of bells, still a molten hour in the dim shade where the sun spells out, still a cool hour in the clean gaps where the breeze steals in. The “radiant garden city beautiful” of old is as neat on paper as it is a choresome sprawl to walk. Life in urban numbers on a human scale calls for great heights. Soleri’s master plan is five percent complete. It calls for twenty-five-story towers. A reporter quipped matter-of-factly that, “If this was [sic] China, you could probably complete Arcosanti in about a year.” The city is still bootstrapped by workshops, tourists, lectures, and bells. It is independent neither with respect to food, nor publishing, nor money. There are enough cars for some to make the weekly schlep to Phoenix to pick up food, drop off bells, and grab a beer. Soleri remained aloof: “I only build the instrument; others must make the music.” He thought utopia a stupid notion—that to dream a world and build it somehow legitimizes its value.

After Soleri’s retirement in 2012, a man named Jeff Stein led the Cosanti Foundation. He lives above the Office of Design; his commute is a seven-rung ladder. He makes twice the average salary at Arcosanti (minimum wage). He brought talk of bakeries and retirement towers, privation and possibility. The how and when were deferred to the county planning department. There was an operating budget of less than $1 million, a tenth of that required to wrest from a dozen masses a living city. Still, it saw Betty Freidan, Phillip Johnson, and Jackson Browne. Jerry Brown came and conceived the California Urban Initiative, which sought to increase the sustainability of city populations. Then the English TV crews, then the Japanese. They always begin with: “We are here in the desert where a small group of people are reinventing the city.”

Soleri, when asked whether Arcosanti met its aim, said, “Don’t be silly.” Stein deemed it the world’s most beautiful construction site. The fact that the world had not taken to Soleri’s vision no more led this breezy prophet to compromise; he’d suggest sincerely that all enquirers and detractors build their own arcology. But sculptors and scientists may wrest their dreams with their own hands. An architect who does not sell his dreams to investors and tycoons merely draws curiosity.

Soleri wrote that the urban effect in its simplest form was a virus. Albright wrote with eerie insistency that Arcosanti had the efficiency of a flu: “How do you send the kids outside to play? What happens when there’s an epidemic?” As it turns out, little in the way of people and much in the way of the whole, locals ceased events, recorded no cases, and continued pouring concrete, welding steel, and stacking desert stones. The COVID-19 pandemic spurred a change more in kind than in degree. One perversely practical and demonically short-sighted columnist on the Arcosanti website wrote that if only Apple or Facebook had built arcologies, “they could have continued operation until they ran into supplier problems […] the only way to prevent the threat from becoming catastrophic is to eliminate the ways people catch it, and you can’t do that unless the entire environment is contained and controlled.”

The world the city eluded—a grid at once too rote and fractured—verges upon it once more. The past and future are spaceless but for relics half-solid and plans half-dreamt. Space is the reality. Social coherence is as much a matter of its partitioning as social control. All which differentiates them here is the care, the religare that people have for the forms in which they dwell. On the one hand, if it had not stuck to the plan, it would not be Arcosanti: still the bells, still the informal efficiency, still the fifteen acres. On the other, predictability (as far as utopias go) is out of the question for the next half-century.

All the certainty Stein admits is that it could have been worse. At times he makes a glib analogy to the slow food movement; at others, he admits that architecture is not in the business of sustaining at all. To build is to scrape life from a patch of earth and set life to dead matter. Forget development; succession at Taliesin has dragged on since Wright’s death in 1959. Accordingly, I’ve heard no more realistic prediction of Arcosanti’s course than that of Jeffrey Grip, the Wright Foundation chairman: the city could crystallize as a museum, consolidate as an archive, or adjust to an increasingly unknown and fatal market.

Stein, when asked of the worst case, said, “You’re looking at it.” He meant it optimistically. There is no mortgage. All is paid for. Half of American energy use fuels the construction and maintenance of buildings; Arcosanti uses a sixth of that used by institutions of its size. It is a utopia far more practical than, say, the 460,000 empty houses in Arizona. Green intentions on an inhuman scale yield brown results.

But it is one thing to describe utopia and quite another to live in it. After a half-century, the concrete has a habit of flaking onto your bed. It is to Arcosanti’s credit that there is no one ideology motivating residents, as in most other intentional communities. A secretary, when questioned as to why she came, cited a need to live in something larger than herself. She was the oldest person there, short of Soleri. Every resident, when asked, stressed one point: in school, everyone was urging the same thing and doing nothing about it. Here was someone doing something, however much one must give up for it. Soleri himself seemed not to know. He insisted at some times that to house a city under one roof does not require a revolution, and at others that it would require an evolution in the species.

In any case, he did not see it as a giving up but a freeing up, streamlining what life may be. Better put, “the virtue of leanness is eventually worthiness”: it is by paring one’s options—reuse over consumption, community over planetary hermitage—that one values them. But to compress human life without killing its mundane and fatal aspects is to amplify them. Most are products of density—disease, pollution, distraction. Most planned solutions on grand scales tend toward social control. Does Arcosanti not literally concretize the most tiresome bits of urban life? Is this arcology or bare life living off the corpse of its excess? If I were not more sympathetic than Albright, I would not be writing; still, I have not found that we can hold a human connection to a smaller space and time without doing the same of agitation. 

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Even granted that Soleri allows (in Albright’s terms) “anarchists, atavists, and barbarians” the “option” to live in the country, I’m most struck by what Arcosanti overlooks: privacy without confinement. Nor is there allowance for children: At last count, the city housed four. A visitor, seeing the bells and barrenness, couldn’t help but recall a Shaker village. Albright wondered whether Arcosanti was not “a subtle Roman Catholic conspiracy to come up with an alternative to birth control.” I do not believe, as he does, that architecture is too important to be left to architects, but thus far, no one has exempted himself from the final say of commerce. I have never known an attempt to condense life that did not project its most oppressive attributes alongside its holiest. I write only wanting to prove myself wrong. Fifty thousand come to Arcosanti yearly. It begins at the end of a two-mile washboard road. Perhaps this is why everyone takes this lapidary city as a matter of course: it stands at the point where all alternatives have waned.

However naive this opposition of salvation and ruin may have seemed in the early 1970s, it seems more justified with each passing year, as spaces exempt from natural disaster and collective rancor wane vanishingly few. Hope of salvation grows familiar as more realistic mitigation grows less viable with time. Barring Vegas, I have never enjoyed the desert. I should not like to live in a city with every man, woman, and child within five minutes’ reach, let alone in Arizona. But the more we cannot sustain our Arcosantis without recourse to apocalypse-alleviation workshops and the patronage of golf-shy retirees, the less there remains for us but desert. This is no mere turn of phrase: a third of the world’s deserts have formed since 1900.

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I always considered that Soleri, far more than Wright, resembled the seminal Wright figure, Howard Roark—the same protégé exiled by his mentor, the same upstart draftsman getting with the daughter of a loaded patron during a slapdash construction job in the sticks. He would sooner implode a plan than see it serve the world it spurns. Arcosanti’s survival now does not hang upon its function—it works so well that gawkers come from the world over. The problem is another: the city survived to a point where it is not enough to live off the world at hand, a point at which the sprawling Phoenixes of the world seem more unreal than their exiles. “The main fault is me,” Soleri confessed. “I don’t have the gift of proselytizing.”

As usual, he was half-shrewd. Four years after his death and two decades after informing his inner circle to no effect, his daughter Daniela published an open letter detailing the attempted rape and monthly sexual abuse that he forced upon her as a teenager. She’d rendered them in her letter of resignation from the Cosanti Foundation six years prior; a colleague wrote that he was “disappointed in everyone.” Given that he later eulogized Soleri, it seems unclear whether he was more disappointed that the sexual abuse occurred or that it was voiced. 

The news was neither shocking nor wanted; Soleri was a sprightly lecher well into his 80s. He would publish flyers informing “Women age over twenty-one” that any “interested in modeling for one or two sittings with Paolo Soleri will get one sketch of themselves free.” A sixty-two-year-old Margie Goldsmith recalled studying the corn on Soleri’s left foot as he asked her for “the privilege of kissing her nipples.” He drew her breasts like upturned bells. She ran out in fright and bestowed Soleri with the fraught honour of spawning the first moment in her life wherein she didn’t feel ashamed about her body. A perfect one, after all, wouldn’t have made for an interesting sketch.

After one month and many attempts to contact her, the Cosanti Foundation stated that they stood “firmly with Daniela.” Daniela replied that it was a strange time to talk about standing firmly. When the Board first learned of Soleri’s actions in 2011, they retired him. Daniela cut relations. The life drawings ceased. Everyone was silent, and no one was relieved. They resolved to praise the art, not the artist. Daniela held that no such cleft was possible: “The same hubris and isolation that contributed to my abuse also made him, and some of his coteries, incapable of sustained engagement with the intellectual and artistic worlds they felt neglected by.” Art from art was apparently a different matter: seventy percent of her father’s corpus was “really valuable and helpful and realistic,” and thirty percent was poison. When asked why she didn’t speak sooner (one gets the idea, at this point, that this is not exactly a useful question), she held that she bore the burden “for the greater good,” a star-eyed heap of graphic diagnoses of civilization’s ills. When Soleri died, there were hagiographies as if the deed were null. It set his “better form of wrongness” to a hellish new meaning.

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What is it, organic architecture? That we draw an image of a world, we do not poison and hope to resemble it? How to shore a form against its time? It is easier to apprehend those who brought us here, prefabs and carports along some unseeing, unending grid. Sustainability is far removed from any function that our present cities have, and predictability is far removed from our alternatives. As Soleri argues, the notion that form follows function is a planetary lie. There exists no function in search of a form—a seed is no function in search of a tree, a girl no function in search of a woman, a cell no function in search of the neurotic web of love, fear, and need which rules the mind. The form unfurls the function; the truth is not given. Motion is the prima materia—the original material. The static is secondary.

Soleri was dire in the short-term and rosy in the long. “From dust we come,” he stressed to skeptics. Perhaps the counterpart is not so much a matter of omission but optimism: to dust we go. To delude this is to hasten it. What is at stake for a nation of box-dwellers and box-watchers but life itself? The end is not, in Henry David Thoreau’s terms, “a wildness no civilization can endure,” but a civilization that wildness can endure. The accord of bodies with the earth beneath them is precarious and perpetual. There is a threshold of planetary ill at which the choice to live off our lives as they are will no longer be ours. We are past it. Is it that we did not resist it in time or that cities and plains cannot live long in one man’s shadow? 

What form, whose will, abides past entropy? Can it hold apart from history’s waste? Phoenix has long metastasized Scottsdale. It creeps northward. The I-17 coils round; on a moonless night, beams and blares from 18-wheelers, yips and wails from coyotes, peals and tolls from bells. The past gnaws at the future and swells as it advances. At the heart of the desert, no one tends the balance. At the end of the tunnel, no one tends the light. Take to open air, open time, and try once again to build by human need (or build a better planetary lie).