About Arcosanti
From blending the Italian words “cosa” and “anti,” meaning “against things,” Soleri named both his architectural design studio and the nonprofit foundation he founded “Cosanti,” as a deliberate critique of the rampant culture of consumerism he saw taking hold in the world. Cosanti – whether as a place of imaginative, provocative architectural experiments or a foundation exploring a built world in balance with the environment – both embody a radically different perspective and aesthetic.
Arcology is the fusion of architecture with ecology, a comprehensive urban perspective. In nature, as organisms evolve, they increase in complexity and become a more compact system. A city should similarly evolve, functioning as a living system. Architecture and ecology as one integral process, is capable of demonstrating positive response to the many problems of urban civilization – population growth, pollution, energy/natural resource depletion, food scarcity, and quality of life. Arcology recognizes the necessity of the radical reorganization of the sprawling urban landscape into dense, integrated, three-dimensional cities in order to support the diversified activities that sustain human culture and environmental balance.
In 1970, The Cosanti Foundation began construction of Arcosanti, a prototype arcology in the higher-elevation Arizona desert that proved to become a testing ground for Soleri’s progressive urban planning concepts. Over the subsequent decades, workshop volunteers, known as Arcosanti Alumni, began to build the iconic architecture of the Arcosanti we know today.
Though the original design of Arcosanti is described in Arcology: The City in the Image of Man, Soleri’s magnum opus on arcology, called for a place where thousands of people would live and work, Arcosanti has never been occupied by more than 100 people. Despite that, it continues to be regarded as an early example of sustainable architecture and vertically-dense building that prioritized live-work spaces and the surrounding natural environment over urban sprawl. Dubbed “the urban laboratory” in the 1970s by famed New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, Arcosanti continues to experiment and test its own potential as a working alternative to urban sprawl, erosion of communities, and neglect of the environment while supporting its residents to lead lives that are enriched socially, energetically, and economically.
Arcosanti is Soleri’s attempt to demonstrate the sort of alternative human habitat we might hope to populate as we come to the end of the age of cheap fossil fuels and unprecedented prosperity. Soleri’s work there – and elsewhere – is not just about building form, but about how form modulates building performance. Arcosanti exemplifies his steadfast devotion to create an experiential space to prototype an architecture that places a connected ecology at the center of the urban experience. To date, over 8,000 students have participated in its construction; more than 30,000 architecture enthusiasts visit the site each year.
The Cosanti Foundation believes its mission to be as relevant, if not more so, today than when it began. As the world’s population continues to grow, the effects of urban sprawl are compounded and the earth becomes further challenged to support humankind with limited natural resources and climate change. The Cosanti Foundation is dedicated to becoming an even more relevant voice in the conversations surrounding sustainable urban development around the world.
Arcosanti Historical Timeline
The Arcosanti Story
Over 8,000 dedicated and determined people have volunteered to create Arcosanti since it first began in 1970. The ambitious experiment that aimed to bring nature closer to people and people closer to each other through its pedestrian, multi-use, vertically-dense design stands in contrast to the urban sprawl and highways that surround it. Built on the premise of archeology, a concept introduced by the late theoretic architect Paolo Soleri, Arcosanti is a prototype micro-city intended to blend architecture and ecology in a way that nurtures the people who live and work there. Scholars, architects, environmentalists, and many others find Arcosanti something that inspires us all to think critically about our roles in creating a balance between the built world and the environment for the good of humankind and he planet.
Camp
To shelter and house the waves of volunteers – the Worshippers – who came as part of a 5-week workshop to build Arcosanti, a base camp on the edge of the Agua Fria River was set up. Measuring only 8×8 ft, modular precast concrete panels were used to create a cube where one person would live, while 8×16 ft and later, 12×12 ft structures were constructed as shared spaces and common areas. Simply referred to as “Camp,” this cluster of concrete cube dwellings have housed residents ever since and today, are joined by a yurt and common bathroom building.
“… If you believe that the human spirit deserves and is capable of better than it as gotten environmentally … if you believe in the human spirit at all, go to the Corcoran … ‘The Architectural Vision of Paolo Soleri’ is an important and beautiful show … His philosophical and environmental perceptions offer a sudden, stunning pertinence for today. He does not need the current bandwagon of despair. He has been preaching environment and ecology for a long time … He has been the prophet in the desert and we have not been listening.”
– Ada Louise Huxtable New York Times,1970
“Soleri bases his entire arcology neither on economic, social, or industrial considerations but on a philosophical system. It is so all-embracing in its scope that it relates the arcological city unity to the entire evolution of organic life, from the proto-biological primordial ooze to an as yet unevolved Neo-Matter …. Insisting that nature and human evolution work as vectors or parallel progressions, he ties the future fate of mankind to the same increasing complexification that has marked the rise of our organism from the amoeba.”
– Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, The Architectural Forum, 1970