Born in 1919 in Turin, Italy, architect Paolo Soleri came to the US in 1947 to study under Frank Lloyd Wright. Soleri and Wright had vastly different views on the shape American cities should take; Wright favored the sprawling “Broadacre City” concept that would disperse people from each other and the nexus of community life, while Soleri envisioned the opposite, an “urban implosion:” a compact and vertically dense, environment that emphasized people’s connection to one another and to nature.
The apprenticeship with Wright, while contentious and brief, influenced Soleri and his life’s work profoundly and cemented his interest in incorporating natural elements as Wright had into his architectural designs. Following his year and a half studying with Wright at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, Soleri received the first of only two commissions in his career to design and build a private home.
Dome House, a futuristic and modest home in Cave Creek, Arizona was completed in 1952. The house attracted the attention of the architecture world and soon after it was built, Soleri accepted a commission to build The Ceramica Artistica Solimene, a ceramics factory on Italy’s Amalfi coast. It was while constructing this factory, now designated an Italian historic building, that Soleri first learned the craft of ceramics.
Returning to Arizona in 1955, Soleri and his wife settled on a 5-acre parcel of land north of Phoenix for “Cosanti,” Soleri’s architectural and design studio, in what was then a rural area where crop and livestock farms thrived. Today, Cosanti sits on the same piece of land and makers of the world-renowned bronze and ceramic wind-bells, Cosanti Originals, operates there. The landscape surrounding Cosanti looks vastly different from when it was founded. The town of Paradise Valley grew around Soleri’s modest piece of land and mansions now populate the area much as farmhouses once did, standing in contrast to the organic and provocative architectural experiments Soleri created there.
Evocative of Grecian and Egyptian structures from the ancient world, or alluding to places found in science fiction, Cosanti’s experimental architecture had a beguiling otherworldliness that was visionary. Where most builders today would build from the ground up, Soleri built his structures from the roof down. Many of Soleri’s structures at Cosanti are built below ground level and surrounded by mounds of earth, acting as natural insulation to better moderate the dwellings’ interior temperatures.
His revolutionary philosophy of “arcology,” a portmanteau of “architecture” and “ecology” is the theory for which Soleri is best known and his landmark 1969 book, “Arcology: The City in the Image of Man,” written at Cosanti became the catalyst for Arcosanti, the experimental micro-city midway between Phoenix and Sedona. Inspired by Soleri’s progressive arcology theory, Arcosanti has been built and inhabited over 50 years by thousands of volunteers. Dubbed “the urban laboratory” by famed New York Times Architecture Critic Ada Louise Huxtable in the mid-1970s, the moniker was embraced by Soleri who was known for his relentless architectural experimentation.
Through writing and publishing 22 books, lecturing internationally, teaching, designing and building, Soleri articulated a powerfully coherent philosophy about the relationship of architecture and ecology that underpinned his work. Along the way, he led and established a precedent for many architects and others who are leaders in the current movement toward sustainability in urban design. Soleri’s work has been widely documented in media and exhibitions, reaching both professionals and academics in the field, and broader audiences worldwide.
Soleri received important acknowledgments and accolades over the span of his career including an AIA Gold Medal, the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion, and the Smithsonian Medal for Lifetime Achievement, among others and he is widely considered to be an important figure in the canon of American architectural history. Hei died in 2013 at the age of 94 in his home at Cosanti.
In 2017, Soleri’s daughter, Daniela Soleri, published an article in Medium, an online news magazine, identifying herself as a victim of sexual abuse by her father. The article is a powerful statement on the limits of power and the Cosanti Foundation supports Daniela Soleri unreservedly. The Cosanti Foundation agrees with her statements in the article that “abuse perpetuated by powerful, talented men” should not be “excused or ignored,” and that we should “sort out our feelings about the works produced by alleged perpetrators vs. the men themselves” in “open and honest discussions about abuse, rather than…blind deference to powerful men and influential artists.” The Foundation separates the man Paolo Soleri from his ideas, regrets the failings of the man, and honors the ideas with its dedication to work for better urban environmental design for humankind and the planet.
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