“Arcosanti is optimism in concrete,” begins Jess Stein, Architect and Co-President of Arcosanti. The following video — a project realized by The Atlantic’s Sam Price-Waldman — tells the story of Arcosanti, an experimental town in the central Arizona desert and the solutions that the model holds for the future of cities throughout the world.
“We define Arcosanti as a kind of urban laboratory,” says Stein, where the experiment is one that deals with spatiality. “How much space do we really need to take up in order to have rich and rewarding lives?”
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Arcosanti initially appears as a place where one is able to live deliberately. In fact, the city also provides its residents with tools to reflect on aspects of the experiment that are transferable to places and peoples across the planet. “We imagine that if cities were devised in the proper form, then something wonderful could happen,” explains Stein.
First imagined in 1970 by the Italian architect Paolo Soleri, Arcosanti aims to represent the three-dimensional, compact, complex urban city of the future, which Soleri spent his entire life researching and designing.
“Right now, we’re kind of a base camp for arcology,” continues Stein, “architecture and ecology as two parts of the same entity.” The city consumes approximately a fifth of the amount of energy that most American developments use. “Our architecture just works harder than your architecture,” he states. Artificial lights are rarely turned on, as the desert sun provides natural light throughout the days. The sun also heats the concrete of the architecture, so that in the evening, it retains its warmth while the air gets cool.
Arcosanti aims beyond the ecological and economical aspect of building an efficient modern city. “We intend to demonstrate how to create a walkable city, not one that is dependent on fossil fuels, but one that is wonderful social space.” People come to live in Arcosanti sometimes for a few weeks, sometimes for several years of their lives.
Nearly 7,000 people have come through the experimental town since 1970. The inhabitants pay a tuition fee and contribute to building the architecture of the city. With around 80 residents living on-site and working for the town, Arcosanti also holds construction workshops and public events throughout the year.
“It’s not what I envisioned for my life, but it’s been the best thing for me,” explains Colleen Reckow, a ceramicist who has lived in Arcosanti for nine years and contributes to one of the city’s main sources of income, the production of ceramic and bronze wind-bells. “People are instantly very open and very direct in their feelings.”
Another resident, Rob Jameson is an Information Systems Manager and used to be a senior project manager of an ad agency. He shows Sam Arcosanti’s Slack system, full of all sorts of public and private channels. “It’s not trying to drop out of mainstream society,” Jameson explains. “It’s trying to say we understand mainstream society intimately, and we’re going to go one or two steps ahead to see where this is going.”
Since Soleri’s death in 2013, “We have had a vision for this place,” explains Stein. Hanne Sue Kirsch, the Soleri Archives Manager, shows the countless drawings made by the architects during his lifetime, utopian developments and machine-like complexes, of which the current commune of Arcosanti only represents a fraction.
“Our work as the next generation of Arcosantians is to revisit Soleri’s early designs and see how they can become buildable and transferable to other places and peoples,” concludes Stein. “If we can devise some way to populate the desert economically, ecologically, socially, it’s going to have value for a third of humanity right away.”
It is important, in this discourse, to acknowledge the existing communities that are native to and have endured living in the central American desert. The well-being of such communities must be considered when assessing the goal of expanding the Arcosanti experiment, which is put forward as a solution to dense and polluting modes of urban living. When over half of the Earth’s population is living in cities — a number likely to continue increasing rapidly in the next few years — minds should come together to solve the issues at hand and address the impacts of efficient architecture and social space.
All images from The Atlantic