The dirt road that leads to Arcosanti was not as long as I expected it to be. Yet the experimental town is far enough from Phoenix and neighboring cities to allow visitors and residents to recognize that they are in a place like nowhere else.
Work on Arcosanti began in 1970. The town was meant to be the world’s first arcology, a concept developed by green architect and urban planner Paolo Soleri. Arcology proposes to fuse architecture with ecology so as to make possible revolutionary ecological human habitats. Unfortunately, Arcosanti has not moved beyond its embryonic state despite its 40 years of existence.
Alastair Gordon’s Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties is an excellent book which provides an overview of the many ways with which individuals and collectives challenged and redefined how and where they lived. The book contains hundreds of examples of projects which failed to survive the political and cultural changes associated with the seventies and eighties. Arcosanti is not one such example.
“On first impression Arcosanti looks like a ruin, all starts and stops and unfinished business,” Gordon notes. “Paolo Soleri intended it to be to be a concentrated living node without cars, a prototype town for seven thousand people, self-sufficient and sustainable. Unlike most visionaries, however, the Italian-born architect actually came to the desert and started to build the thing with his own hands.”
The sight of Arcosanti in the distance is far from spectacular despite its position atop one of the many mesas found in central Arizona. Only a small portion of the experimental town has been built and much of its wealth and beauty reside in dreams not yet fulfilled. But this does not mean that Arcosanti’s demise is imminent. The towering cypress trees interspersed throughout the site remind us that it is too early to declare the town a failed experiment.