In Arizona: "A City Has to Be Built"

By D.L. Coutu

When seen from the exit leading off Interstate 17, 73 miles north of Phoenix, it shimmers in the summer heat, a mirage-like vision that somewhat resembles parts of battlestar Galactica crash-landed in the desert. Arcosanti. The name alone suggests hallucination. It is derived from arcology (architecture concerned with ecology) and cosanti (Italian for "thing before"). An engineer showing off the unfinished structure's apses and arches proudly describes it as "the city of the future taking shape in the state of the past."

The idea behind Arcosanti is beguilingly simple: since cities shape society, they should be constructed in ways that accelerate human development. "We can't go back to nature," says Paolo Soleri, 61, the Italian-born architect who is Arcosanti's prime mover and chief guru, by way of exhorting the band of vagrants, zealots and children of the '60s who have followed him into the desert. The city, Soleri argues, is a necessary tool for nudging the human spirit toward the "omega point," a state of highly evolved consciousness. Humanity's enemy is urban sprawl. The Soleri solution: a metropolis built in the country, and rising up rather than spreading out.

What Soleri has planned is a self-sufficient city for 5,000 people spread over 15 acres and housed under one enormous glass roof. There will be a 25-story-high complex for both apartments and light industries turning out furniture, textiles and other products, as well as shopping centers and parks. Both solar heat and the food for a heavily vegetarian diet will come from a 4 1/2-acre complex of greenhouses attached to the city's southern flank. While Arcosanti will have only about two-thirds the area of Manhattan's Rockefeller Center, it will be set in 4,000 acres of Arizona wilderness, riverbed and valley owned or leased by a foundation set up by Soleri.

Arcosanti, through a technology not yet developed, is to be largely solar powered. No cars, no prisons and no cemeteries will be permitted. Skeptical visitors are assured by bubbly tour escorts that the city will indeed be built, and will produce the best of all possible worlds, urban life in a rural setting. Guide Ann Whitehill, 23, earnestly tells a tour group, "In the finished city there will even be pizza parlors." "And neighbors who are friends," adds Ralph Kratz, 42, a civil engineer on the Arcosanti staff. Indisputably, the project has already become established as one of the more curious vessels into which individuals intent on finding somehow, somewhere, a better life, might pour their hopes.

After ten years of work, Arcosanti is only 2% finished. With reason. A visitor stopping by at sunset wonders whether the dungareed construction crew, numbering fewer than 100 and now lounging around the grounds sipping beer, could get themselves organized enough to erect a Meccano set version of the Eiffel Tower. But Arcosanti's supporters are unconcerned that the city could take anywhere from 20 to 200 years to complete, depending on finances. "Look how many hundreds of years it took to build Chartres," says Riney Bennett, 26, a Stanford-educated civil engineer. "Arcosanti will be built, but without money it will take time."

Ranchers and other neighbors complained about the project in the early '70s, when some of Soleri's liberated female workers decided to toil away barebreasted, and "every trucker on Interstate 17 found some reason to stop at Arcosanti." Stories about drugs and skinny-dipping in nearby Lynx Lake upset the many religious fundamentalists in a state where billboards proclaim that "the wages of sin is death."

But Arcosanti is no hotbed of radicals plotting the downfall of capitalism. Rather, the project has gone the way of the nation: as conservatism and conformity became acceptable on campuses again, earnest and clean-living Outward Bound types began to outnumber the laid-back dopers at the desert construction site. Says Volunteer Terry Kearns: "They told us if we had to smoke dope, they had better never see us do it. It's like ninth grade all over again."

Soleri's disciples are mainly white, middle class and college educated. Many come from what they call "a small California college," which often turns out to be Stanford. Though they take communal meals and share a withering scorn for "obvious suburbanites," these principled individuals are only quietly radical. "Arcosanti is based on solid middle-class values," says Scott Riley, 27, a former "small college" student. "We don't object to sitting around Sundays reading the New York Times, but we refuse to get caught up in working umpteen hours to pay for a nice car to go to the store to buy that paper." Presumably, in the best of all possible cities, the paper will be delivered.

Keeping both the dreams and the drudgery going is the extraordinary task, and achievement, of Soleri. Though Soleri seems simple and humble, Arcosanti's "workshoppers," as his volunteers call themselves, regard him as a genius, evidently because of his preoccupation with things spiritual. When he first came to the U.S. from Turin 33 years ago, he was regarded as a builder with panache and promise. But he has had few commissions in three decades. "I have not been properly used," he insists. One Arcosanti worker says that Soleri is the only architect around today better known for what he has not built than for what he has.

But like Providence, Soleri works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. He operates within a paltry budget of $250,000 a year, most of which comes from his books and lectures, the sale of bells made on the site, and the $300 fees paid by those who come to toil on the project for a five-week workshop period. Those who stay longer get put on the payroll at $35 a week; and a few "Frank Lloyd Wright Scholars" attend free in exchange for manning the kitchens, a reminder of Soleri's own apprenticeship at Wright's Taliesin West. Yet for all the frailty of Arcosanti's finances, Soleri has been able to maintain out side interest in his project for a decade. The mystique of his eclectic, quasi-religious creed, cribbed from sages as different as Matthew Arnold and Teilhard de Chardin (whose name will be on a huge cloister planned for Arcosanti), draws hundreds of visitors from around the world to the site each year. Many of them come to try out as children of the Arcosanti dream.

Those who do stay for what one work-shopper calls a chance to make a "one-inch contribution to mankind" begin their mornings at 5, when they and Supervising Architect Tony Brown, 43, decide how the day is to be spent. At present, the crew is building the foundations for Arcosanti's East Crescent, a residential and theater complex. While the blueprint reading and the blasting are entrusted only to experienced hands, workshoppers do the heavy jobs like pouring concrete. "We were flower children," says Maria Gonzalez, 30, "and we had our vague ideas about praying and meditation and 15,000 relationships. But most of us have grown up now, and what is happening here is just plain hard work. A city has to be built."

Arcosanti receives periodic pummelings from discontented workshoppers and journalists. Soleri and his group shrug them off. Their commitment to the future certainly seems sincere. They are people who want to be part of something big and good and natural. Each year they cele brate the solstices and the equinoxes with all the abandon of 18th century English villagers gamboling round the Maypole on May Day. It was during one of these festivals that a cast-aluminum figure of Icarus was hung from the top of a 34-ft. vault, where it remained for many months. The symbolism was perhaps unintended, but telling. The ambitious reach of these so lar-crazed Soleri followers still far exceeds their grasp. "I only hope Arcosanti will be finished before I pass on," Jeff Charroin, 20, says earnestly. Adds Ann Whitehill: "Maybe it will never be built, because we'll probably all be blown up before then. But at least at Arcosanti, we're going down with our heads high."

And maybe with wings just a bit sunburned.

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