What is Arcology BU

What is an Arcology?

The fusion of architecture with ecology: A comprehensive urban perspective.

Slow reformation and adaptation characterize the pace of our contemporary sustainability movement. We make incremental progress, changing consumption patterns – driving electric vehicles, attempting to recycle, or outfitting our single family homes with solar panels. Still, we are not confronting the deeply entrenched societal and infrastructural norms at the root of our problems.

Our contemporary urban-suburban form is inclined towards materialism, individualism, and waste. It’s reported that if the 7.4 billion people on earth were to consume like the average American, we would need over 4 globes to sustain us.

With exponential population growth, the work ahead is to learn how we can change our behavior in a meaningful and accessible way.

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 three-dimensional cities in order to support the diversified activities that sustain human culture and environmental balance.

Design principals.

1. Pedestrian-first environment.

As it stands, our environments are tailored for the automobile as we see in most American cities and elsewhere – a technology that is proving to be more problematic to the environment, and the populace. 50% of the modern American city is devoted to the car, while automobile usage amounts to 5-10% of the citizens day. Human scale could be obtained through densely organized urban environment where pedestrians move efficiently and freely.

2. Urban agriculture.

As cities grow, farmland is pushed far away from the urban center. As a result, citizens are detached from where and how their meals are sourced. In the urban form of Arcology, the citizens are connected with the production of food in a way that confirms the necessity of robust agriculture systems. Efficient use of water and energy through greenhouses and other innovative systems also contributes to overall efficiency of the city.

3. Reduce consumption.

By utilizing available technologies, such as passive climate controlling architecture; innovative water & sewage treatment systems, and use of appropriately sourced building materials, Arcology strives for reduction of material and energy consumption and an increased quality of life.

4. Mixed-use public spaces

In cities around the world, we empirically observe the benefits of combining functions and activities within urban space. Properties such as enhanced city safety, a vibrant sense of community, and utility efficiency all add up to a truly beneficial urban form. The crucial spaces within the city become shared, public spaces – accessible by all, respected in common, thriving with socialization, confrontation and growth. With mixed-use space, we acknowledge that the city can become much more than the sum of its parts.

5. Vertical density.

Urban growth boundaries are a common element of modern American city-planning, though they are often the result of efforts to protect remaining farmland and other rural or open spaces, rather than efforts to enhance the cities themselves. In Arcology, bounded density is understood as a means of protecting the environment, of course, but it is also understood as a way to provide lively and robust urban activities. Rather than sprawling outward toward a prescribed limit (which may still exceed the resource capacity of the actual environment), Arcology seeks to grow upward and inward.

6. Creative resourcefulness

“Do more with less” is a fundamental Solerian axiom. The French might call it “bricolage” — something constructed from a diverse range of available resources. In an age of excess, our design seeks to craft space where the frugal utilization of material and shared resources necessities and cultivates elegance. An aesthetic in juxtaposition to rudimentary material affluence.

The city is the necessary instrument for
the evolution of humankind.

— Paolo Soleri

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

Lean Alternatives

With exponential population growth, the work ahead is to learn how we can change our behavior in a meaningful and accessible way.

Small improvements, while pragmatic and available, produce only a “better kind of wrongness” that in the eyes of the rational thinker may not even be worth while. Arcology suggests complete reformulation of how we exist within our environments – a new urban paradigm geared towards cultural evolution, frugal resiliency, and balance with nature.

Design Principles

Urban Scale as Human Scale

(Pedestrian Environment)

Food & Energy Nexus

(Urban Agriculture)

Marginalized Consumption

(Embodied Efficiency)

Urban Effect

(Proximity & Vibrancy)

Bounded Density

(Ecological Envelope)

Elegant Frugality

(Creative Resourcefulness)

“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.”