Word: soleri
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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 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...
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...
...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...
...most of the present-day prophets disappoint Thompson. Architect Paolo Soleri, with his beehive city projects aimed at accommodating architecture with ecology, and Educator Ivan Illich, with his hope of "deschooling" society, turn out to be looking backward. Reacting to a world too full of growth, they strive to return to simpler, medieval values. (Nevertheless, both Illich and Soleri represent something Thompson admires: the achievement of authority unaccompanied by institutional power.) The Club of Rome, on the other hand, looks forward to a world of no growth. But Thompson dismisses its recommendations too because he distrusts rule by any "technocratic...