To get to Arcosanti, you must drive 70 miles north of Phoenix -- one of the fastest growing (read: sprawling) areas of the country, through gorgeous saguaro-covered desert hills to a 2.5 mile dirt road in the middle of the Arizona wilderness. At the end of that road, you’ll find what has been called one of this century’s most important urban habitat experiments. Yes, urban.
The not-yet-fully realized vision of architect/urban designer/dreamer Paolo Soleri is built according to his philosophy of arcology -- an intersection of architecture and ecology that uses sustainable principles like natural lighting, passive solar heating/cooling, and mixed-use space. Once complete, Arcosanti will house 5,000 people on just 25 acres. To put that feat in perspective, housing 5,000 people in your typical suburbia-style development would take about 500 acres.
The thick concrete buildings are shaped into quarter-spheres (called apses in architect-speak) and face southward so that the winter sun, low on the southern horizon, warms them and the hot summer sun is blocked when overhead, providing cool shade. Using smart design tricks like these (as opposed to fancy new tech like wind turbines and solar panels -- though they do have both), Arcosanti is able to keep electricity use low and efficient.
Established in 1970, the community is slowly being built by residents and visitors who take part in their multi-week educational seminars. To fund this work, they rely primarily on the sale of goods -- the most notable of which are the Soleri Wind Bells, handcrafted on site from ceramics and bronze. More than being unique works of art, these bells served, in part, as inspiration for Arcosanti’s design. When Soleri began making the bells using silt molds he carved in the desert river beds, he realized that he could use a similar method to make buildings on a much larger scale. And thus, Arcosanti was born.
While visiting Arcosanti, we were lucky enough to get a special tour from one of the residents, Erin Jeffries, who also serves as a public relations coordinator for the Cosanti Foundation. In the video below, she explains the vision for Arcosanti and takes us on a tour of the community, stopping along the way to talk about the apse-shaped structures, the bell-making process, and the myriad mixed-use spaces.
Below, more amazing pictures from the Arcosanti tour:
Home Economics of the JP Green House, Part 1
Slideshow: Reinventing the JP Green House
Comments
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GreenEngineer Posted 4:49 am
30 Sep 2008
The architect relies exclusively on cast concrete, one of the highest footprint, highest carbon materials you can use. Concrete is a great material, but environmentally sensitive buildings should use it selectively, in ways that take advantage of its structural properties. Using it to building a shade structure doesn't qualify.
The failings of the design are more obvious and visible, though, if you look at the living quarters: every single unit has a window air conditioner, and when I was there (in the summer, granted) every one of them was running. Small AC units like that are the most inefficient way to provide cooling; if the designer had done his homework, he would have realized that some kind of supplementary cooling was going to be necessary -- it's really bloody hard to achieve comfort in that climate with purely passive design. (It can be done, but barely.) With that realization, he either could have gone back to the drawing board to improve his design, or accepted the need for additional cooling and designed accordingly, with a central chiller and a chilled water distribution system, or with earth channels for pre-cooling incoming, or with mini-split heat pumps, etc.
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waterman Posted 1:32 am
01 Oct 2008
I don't think you are seeing the project for what it is.
Arcosanti is the (concrete cast) physical embodiment of a vision. This vision was formed in the late sixties as a response to the rapid horizontal development of Phoenix and posed an alternative idea of a compact threedimensional city that is not based on air conditioning and car traffic, expanding across the landscape. It is documented in several beautiful books. The built result is almost by necessity a first draft with many faults and incomplete to boot. This may seem sad given the fact that it has been around and in progress since the early seventies.
But you can't deny the impressive perseverance and moral integrity with which the project has been realised by Paolo Soleri, largely self-funded. Although it didn't serve to stop Phoenix from growing into one of the largest and un-ecological cities on earth, I think it has had an influence on architects and planners around the world. And the model it offers at least in its 'ideal' drawn version is still inspiring and relevant. The built Arcosanti is offering a glimpse of this. It is a special place to visit and stay and enjoy for itself. I have participated in a five-week workshop at Arcosanti and enjoyed living and working in one place so close to the Arizonian landscape. Being an architect's unfinished project, the community never really has seemed to have settled in, as it has in other alternative communities. Still there is a lot happening and there is an interesting dynamic between the centre and the 'temporary' settlement close to the agricultural land called 'camp'.
All in all it is an experiment, the success of which is defined by what we can learn from it, which each of us can do in his own way, but it takes more than pointing out the mistakes from a strictly enviromen-technical viewpoint.
Paul de Graaf, Rotterdam, the Netherlands
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sjg Posted 5:35 am
01 Oct 2008
Cheers,
Susanna Gross
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waterman Posted 7:11 am
01 Oct 2008
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