ARCOSANTI – THE ARCOLOGY THAT NEVER WAS

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Only the grey buildings have been built

Compared with the behemoth hyper-structures in his superlative book, Soleri’s Arcosanti project (begun in 1970) is very modest in both scale and conception.  Arcosanti is not a genuine Arcology since it is composed of a number of separate buildings, rather than an enclosed ‘city within a building’.  It is also totally reliant on conventional water, power, and food supplies, so there is very little sustainability aspect unlike the Oasis-Cities concept,

When I visited (and stayed for a couple of days) in 1999 I asked the middle-aged resident in charge of admission how many people actually lived there full-time like him.   Very few apparently – no more than a dozen or two, and greatly outnumbered by the students.   He seemed resigned to the fact that Arcosanti would never be completed.

Frugality – a rather unappealing aspect of Soleri’s austerity philosophy – is very evident at Arcosanti.  Its inhabitants are expected to live in simple non air-conditioned rooms with no windows, sharing communal ablution and kitchen facilities.   When it featured on the Australian TV “Beyond 2000” science programme, the reporter likened the living quarters to “monastic cells”.