Recycling Arcosanti

Alex Steffen is a planetary futurist and creator of the books Worldchanging, Carbon Zero and the forthcoming The Snap Forward. Follow Alex on Twitter or to sign up to get his free weekly newsletter.

(This piece was written back in 2002.)

Arcosanti is arguably the most famous utopian architectural experiment of our age.

The brainfruit of Paolo Soleri, Arcosanti was envisioned as a 6,000-person “arcology,” a hyperdense sustainable town meant to serve as a prototype alternative to sprawl. Countless books, documentaries and articles have hyped the revolutionary qualities of the Italian architect’s new town. Even the staid old New York Times once called it “A lab for future cities, part commune, part Flash Gordon.” At one point, not so long ago, Arcosanti was The Future, in buzzing electric letters.

I drive in over a washboard dirt road, following the signs to the Arcosanti Visitors’ Center (nearly 50,000 people a year visit). When I get there, I see a handful of buildings grouped together and, well, a whole ‘lotta nuthin’, just scrub stretching away towards a distant freeway. I hear a truck downshift in the distance. I wonder where the rest of the town is.

I drift into the visitor’s center. There are bells everywhere – bronze bells, clay bells. Soleri is famous as a designer of bells, but this is a bit too much. Then I enter the gallery, where things get entirely out of hand: rows and rows of bells hang from the ceiling. All are for sale. For some reason, there is a low-grade laser-print photo of Barbara Bush on the wall.

At the information desk, the gallery manager – a less-than-charismatic man, with beady eyes, thick glasses and a nest of long thinning hair – will barely acknowledge my presence. When I explain that I’m a journalist, and ask if there might be anyone who could answer questions for me, he practically recoils from me, and I worry that he may start yelling, “Unclean! Unclean!” He makes a quick phone call, then tells me in a curt tone that “Our PR person is out today. No one here can talk with you.”

Now, I’m sure he meant that there was no one trained to answer my questions in the helpful, professional and unbiased manner of PR flacks everywhere (oh, those selfless servants of the Fourth Estate!), but it somehow came out, “I don’t like you and I wish you would die quickly and quietly.” Apparently, the press is less than loved at Arcosanti. I began to catch a hint of the stink of True Believers on the wind.

Eventually, I am allowed to take the hourly tour, at a cost of eight dollars. I am the only tourist. My tour guide, Bernadette, is a nice enough woman with a bright print fleece and graying hair, though she holds her body stiffly and looks at me as a polite person might look at a snake. We stroll over to a corner of the gallery, where a large, say fifteen square-foot, balsawood model portrays the City of the Future. I notice there is a heavy layer of dust on the City of the Future.

Arcosanti, Bernadette explains to me in a monotone, was built as an “experimental urban arcology for 6,000 people” — arcology being “Paolo’s coinage for a place whose architecture and ecology are in balance.” This is most comprehensible thing she says for the next ten minutes. I get to hear “Paolo’s” story (and everyone in the place refers to Saleri as Paolo, in frankly reverent tones): his birth (in Italy in 1919), his student years with Frank Lloyd Wright, his years in the desert, supporting his mad architectural scribblings through the creation and sale of hand-made bronze bells, the impulse behind his founding of Arcosanti. I’m a big fan of mad genius, and it’s an interesting enough story, but it’s shot full of insider terminology, and every time I ask a question, I seem to throw Bernadette off, and she has to pause and begin again with the exact same phrasing she had just used. Bernadette could be animatronic, I think.

Finally, we get to the town itself, or at least the model of the town. [In explaining it’s raison d’etre, she keeps using the phrase “the urban sprawl,” as in “we need a new way of building cities so we don’t turn into the giant urban sprawl.” It’s petty, but I can’t help but notice it, like a person with a tic]

The imaginary Arcosanti’s pretty magnificent: huge, arching apartment buildings, a university, a clinic. Five acres of greenhouses on the south slope heat the buildings above in the winter through a system of heat tunnels, while in the summer deciduous trees and grape bowers will leaf out to cover the giant walls of glass. There are systems as well for rainwater collection and graywater use, for composting and recycling, and all traffic within the city is on foot.

“So what’s been built so far?” I ask.

“Well, we’ve had some problems with the funding,” she begins. She glances quickly around the room to make sure we’re alone, then goes on in a quick, low voice, a total I’m-dishing-the-dirt voice. First they thought they’d be supported by grants from large foundations and government support, she says, but that never quite worked out. Then they tried holding festivals. At the first festival, a grassy field was turned into a parking lot, and “something – we don’t know if it was a catalytic converter or a cigarette” caught the grass on fire. “Over one hundred cars blew up,” she tells me, nodding. “So we didn’t really make any money off that one.” At the next festival, the concentrated activities on the banks of the nearby Agua Fria river. Unfortunately, it has rained upstream the night before, and a flashflood came and carried off all the tents, exhibits and kitchens. “As you might imagine, that wasn’t much of a profit-maker, either.” She smiles a tiny little wry smile as she recounts this story. Bernadette’s not so bad.

“So, when you ask what’s been completed, keep in mind that we’re still in a process of growth,” she says, and points to a tiny area on the diorama – say ten inches by six inches: about a dozen model buildings, bordered by a thin black line. It turns out that about 3% of the city has been built in the last 30 years, and about 70 people, not 6,000, live there. “In some ways, we’re not very close to what Paolo has envisioned,” she admits, and I’m about to ask her in which ways they are close, but she barrels on to describe how they still get almost all their energy from the power company, and their water comes pumped from an ancient aquifer, and how (while they have added a wind generator and so photovoltaic panels in recent years, and created a system for letting some of their waste water be cleaned in algae ponds for later use in watering the landscape) the city’s infrastructure is really pretty conventional.

I have more questions, but she suggests we take a walk.

It’s a fine early evening in the desert. As we walk, Bernadette points out some kilns, remarks on the cypress and olive trees Soleri has had planted across the site, and leads me into the pottery studio.

The pottery studio — I keep calling it the Pottery Barn, but Bernadette doesn’t seem to catch the joke, so I drop it — is cleverly designed. Built in an apse shape (think of a forty-foot tall concrete band shell), it lets winter sunshine flow into its glass-fronted workshops, while shading the whole area during the sweltering summer days. A circular trench runs in front of the building, turning the front of the floor into workbenches when needed. Bernadette goes on to describe in great detail the molding process used to make clay bells, but a young potter with an attractive cast to her features and an artisan’s intense expression of concentration is sitting next to us, and I find myself distracted.

Arcosanti, she goes on to tell me, is now funded almost entirely through the sale of bells. It is essentially one big crafts guild. Which is a fine thing to be. Indeed, sitting there in the evening light, with birds chirping, and the young potter smiling my way, I can see the appeal: fuck it, let’s all throw aside our worries and make bells. It’ll be a good life. But it’s not the City of the Future.

We continue our walk. We pass a couple apartment buildings. The buildings themselves are a bit weathered and, well, not my architectural preference (very 70’s, very blobject, very Planet of the Apes), but they are well-designed (they all employ passive solar, many have “sky theaters” built into the roof for sitting out and viewing the stars at night). The public space is great. There’s an amphitheater with a waterfall running down the middle of the seats. Residents run a little store, the “Arc Mart,” where you can buy your food and toiletries. There’s a small hotel for visitors, with a swimming pool. Construction is underway on a new building which will have more apartments, a movie theater and an infirmary. Sometimes the entire community gathers at night on the roofs of buildings overlooking the canyon, and lights are shone against the cliffs of the other side, and dancers perform in front of them, sending huge shadows writhing on the basalt walls.

Bernadette pauses for a moment. “You know, Paolo imagined cities on the ocean, factories on the sides of dams…” she trails off. Her mind is elsewhere for a moment, and she looks younger than she has. I can tell she’s not seeing the cracked concrete slabs and fading paint, but something altogether more beautiful.

She snaps out of it, and leads me to the bronze bell-making area. I feign interest. Bernadette explains, in mind-hammering detail, how molds are made, and bronze ingots melted, and decoration added. Humoring her, I say “It’s amazing how much you’ve been able to accomplish on so little money.”

“Well, yes,” she says, clearly pleased, “but really, money isn’t everything. A lot of the construction is done by the people who come for the workshops (five-week workshops can be attended for a tuition of several hundred dollars, and nearly 5,000 people have taken them, according to the Arcosanti literature), and we all get paid minimum wage. So we can keep going on with the work.” In other words, it’s a tourism and tokens economy.

Then we’re back at the visitor’s center. Bernadette makes a pitch for the food in the café, and then leaves me to wander the final exhibit alone.

Arcosanti’s half life is long over, and it is headed for it’s own tiny heat-death. It may still be growing, but the vision and the reality have too long diverged, and my sense was that the True Believers needed desperately to convince themselves that the dream was still alive. Maybe it is. Who am I, really, to say otherwise? Let them build their utopia in the desert, if they can pull it off.

It’s not a bad dream. Nothing there is all that revolutionary now, in this day and age where government buildings employ passive solar, and you can buy photovoltaic hat fans and laptop chargers, but there’s no reason why an outworn future can’t be chased longingly to completion. And Soleri’s critique of sprawl, and manifest belief in the healing powers of compact community and a walking population, still sound just fine to me. I’ll not complain if they’re actually embodied in place.

It takes training to read space in the abstract, and to imagine the experience of place simply be looking at a plan or a drawing is an artform in itself. To be comprehended by regular people, radically innovative ideas need to be made concrete – you need to be able to walk around them, kick the foundations. You need to test them with your feet. That’s why model communities are so important. That’s why innovative prototypes— when we can actually get them built — are so powerful.

But Arcosanti isn’t the future anymore. It smells too much of museum dust. It’s the embalmed husk of a future, and a future that’s older than I am, at that. I get in the car, and drive back down the rutted road, and wonder if I’ll find some fresher dream ahead.

Originally published on June 3rd, 2004 on Worldchanging