ARCOLOGY - COMBINING ARCHITECTURE AND ECOLOGY
Nestled deep into a fertile land preserve of the Arizona desert, Arcosanti's architecture slowly emmerges with contrasting postmoderm forms. The small village is an urban laboratory created by italian architect Paolo Soleri (apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright!).
This community developed around the same time as earthships did, and many similar ideas are incorporated into the buildings. Indeed, Soleri played with south facing edifices, thermal mass and food production, But he applied all of these concepts at an urban scale. In creating Arcosanti, Soleri aimed to find an alternative to urban sprawl; humans becoming too isolated in the suburban wasteland that was already becoming maintream reality.
In that sense, the experiment is designed as a large scale contained ecology, where architectural systems and humans work together to minimize waste and maximise efficiency. Here cars are basically unnecessary, and the architecturally efficient apse shape of many buildings is meant to enable human interaction. Indeed, in this concept, design is intended to fuse efficiency, sustainability and community. And this is very much the case in Arcosanti, where many spaces were built for community gathering, so that concerts, festivals and performances in general are a regular event (example in the video below). Soleri's city therefore works as a sustainable, community-oriented superstructure, where urban spaces embody things such as solar greenhouses that produce food and heat, recycle organic waste and conserve water - and spaces which reflect on how to intelligently move people and their goods and services between them.
Having visited, Arcosanti feels like a living utopia. As the desert sun beats down on this beautifully landscaped earth and built arcology, the spaces feel fluid and flowing and call for interacting bodies to fill them.
Video by Arcosanti
Photos from Flickr