Not long after I conceptualised the idea of Oasis-Cities (or “Pyramid Cities” as I originally dubbed them) in the early ’90’s, I stumbled across a truly mesmerising book in the library of UNLV (Las Vegas). Although it came as no surprise that such an appealing (appalling to many, apparently) idea as 3D cities had previously been thought of, the mind-boggling scale of Soleri’s “Arcologies” was staggering.
HG Wells was possibly the first to mention the idea of “cities as single buildings” when, in “The Sleeper Awakes” (1899), the protagonist awakes 200 years in the future to find that all the cities and towns of England had been replaced by a few “stupendous hotels”. The book doesn’t describe these giant “hotels” in any detail – except to portray them as “dystopian” places run by tyrants – a theme unfortunately re-hashed and re-inforced in the public imagination in many sci-fi books and movies since.
Each of its super-sized double-spread pages contained intricately-detailed hand-drawn plans of gargantuan buildings – each one a self-contained city. Co-incidentally, in 1993 the Las Vegas Luxor Hotel, to this day the only mega-pyramid ever intended to be “lived-in”, had then recently been completed. It was, and still is, a very impressive building – and yet it has never been replicated. So my biggest disappointment with Soleri’s concepts was that only one was “pyramidal”, a strange inverted thing on stilts, which can be seen in the centre of the image above. For someone promoting environmental architecture I thought this a major omission, for reasons explained HERE.
As much as possible, an Arcology would be self-sufficient in water, energy, and essential foodstuffs. Energy consumption would be minimised and re-cycling systems for water and waste would be fully integrated. Since there would be no need for cars, walking would be restored as the primary mode of transport.
An Arcology can be defined as “City within a building”, “City under one roof”, or “Enclosed City”. But just how big should a city be..? Most cities today are vast sprawling conurbations, usually containing millions of people. But historically a city could be quite tiny, as long as it had a great church, a cathedral, like the City of Wells in Somerset.
Soleri’s idea of hundreds of thousands (even millions) of people in a single mega-structure is not just impractical, but totally un-necessary OVERKILL..! Not just economically and in structural feasibility, but also in terms of aesthetics, dynamics, social cohesion, and in many other ways.
Soleri did his own idea a great dis-service by giving the impression that an Arcology had to be GARGANTUAN – stupendously larger than any existing or projected building.
For a while, in the 1970’s, Soleri and Arcologies were often in the news, but they both slipped off the radar well before concern about “the environment” became the hot topic it is today. Nowadays, the term “Arcology” is more familiar to sci-fi fans than architects, most of whom have never heard the term.
Ultimately, Soleri’s ideas failed to be taken seriously because, although technically and theoretically brilliant, his designs were so mind-bogglingly ENORMOUS, like “Novanoah 1” below, that there was no possibility of them – or anything similar – becoming a reality in the foreseeable future.
