Word: arcosanti
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...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 4½-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...
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...
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...
...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...