ARCOSANTI – THE ARCOLOGY THAT NEVER WAS
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Compared with the behemoth hyper-structures in his superlative book, Soleri’s Arcosanti project (begun in 1970) is very modest in both scale and ambition. 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 in 1999, and stayed in one of their $20 a night motel-style rooms, 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 those greatly outnumbered by the students. He was resigned to the fact that Arcosanti would never be completed in his lifetime.
A few years later – in 2006 – I was visiting Kunming in SW China when, in a restaurant popular with foreigners, I met an attractive Italian-American woman working as an English teacher there. Over a bottle of Chinese red wine she told me she once lived in a “commune” called “Arcosanti” and had her first-born (and Arcosanti’s first baby) there in 1970. At the time she was still closely associated with Soleri, having had some kind of admin position at Cosanti, Scottsdale. We kept up email contact for 2/3 years but I then lost contact as one does.