Inside a unique experimental eco-village built into Arizona's Sonoran Desert.
This story contains references to rape and child abuse.
I
n spring, Arizona begins to bake. In the hot, desolate Sonoran Desert, the midday sun inches the temperature past 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which makes any walking unpleasant—but the hot, sprawling desert landscape is not meant for walking. The beauty of the open horizon is better appreciated inside an air-conditioned vehicle or, if you’re a certain type of traveler, on horseback; the wind (organic or inorganic) distracts from the intensity of the heat and allows you to notice the particular beauty of the brown rolling hills and the desert life that dots them, including the majestic saguaro cacti.
From Phoenix, I traversed the desert northward for just over an hour to reach Arcosanti, a live-and-work compound that touts itself as an “Urban Laboratory.” It is the brainchild of Paolo Soleri, an Italian-American architect, and urban planner who put forth the idea of “arcology”—a portmanteau of “architecture” and “ecology” that is embodied in the creation of a city that exists in balance with the surrounding environment.
In theory, this was a compact, densely populated, and self-sufficient microcity with all necessary amenities of life within building parameters, including systems of food production, waste recycling, entertainment, schooling, and commercial enterprises. Soleri sought to bring this theory to life in the high desert of Arizona, beginning completely from scratch on an empty plot of land, relying on the building hands of students and volunteers whose numbers reached thousands since its beginning in 1970.
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Paolo Soleri was born in Turin, Italy, in 1919. As a young man in Mussolini’s Italy, he considered the United States the land where dreams were made and secured his ticket overseas by committing to a fellowship with Frank Lloyd Wright—a man whose stylistic influences reverberate through modernist architecture and, more specifically, in Scottsdale, where he kept his living and working compound, Taliesin West. Wright and Soleri didn’t particularly get along, and Soleri was asked to leave Taliesin West in 1949. Following his leave, Soleri completed a commission, got married, and returned to Italy, where he became a ceramicist and designed a ceramics factory; with that money, the family returned to Arizona, where he drew up a plan for his own living, and working compound in Paradise Valley that he named Cosanti. This was 1956.
“Cosa” in Italian means thing, and “anti” means against or before, and per its name, the Cosanti compound served as a place where people were meant to live and work together with minimal draws of the material world. Soleri was highly critical of postwar consumerism and urban sprawl, with its large, single-family suburban habitats and dependence on automobiles.
“The storage of people in planned communities, generous in space, deprived of humanness, does not qualify as architecture,” Soleri told Lissa McCullough in 2011. “They belong to devolution, a storaging.”
Soleri also believed that the effects of suburbia were not only social but environmental. In his notebook, which he kept daily, he wrote that “the metastasis of the city” created a culture characterized by “isolation, logistical crippling, land destruction, soil decay, aquifer degradation, quarantine of forests, pollution, and inevitably, materialism—a biblical-scale catastrophe.”
Instead, he thought humans should build up and more densely to minimize their impact on the surrounding environment. It certainly isn’t difficult to imagine what he would’ve thought of Paradise Valley today as Phoenix’s wealthiest suburb, full of luxurious, sprawling villas with manicured lawns, multi-vehicle garages, and crisp, unspoiled views of the Camelback and McDowell mountains.
By the 1960s, Cosanti drew hundreds of students and volunteers who were enraptured by the idea of building, living in, and working from a sustainable desert dwelling. Towards the end of the decade, Soleri decided that it was time for him to execute his ideas on a bigger scale, and in 1970, traveled 70 miles north from Paradise Valley to purchase an 860-acre of land on a basaltic mesa and began the construction of Arcosanti.
Living in Arcosanti
Arcosanti is not a particularly cozy place to live, and Soleri intended it as such. During the early years, the students and volunteers lived in tents and 8×8 concrete cubes, exerting physically demanding labor in construction and agriculture. In Arcosanti as an Urban Laboratory? (Avant Books, 1984), Soleri noted, as a postscript, that “Arcosanti is not so much a place for the self-expression of young people, but a place for the self-discipline and commitment of such persons within a different structure of habitat.” In the 1970s, the counterculture movement drew many to the desert, but a subset of those looking for a drug-friendly party scene were turned away or left on their own accord when they learned there was serious work to be done.
In 1970, the New York Times reported that “Soleri does not intend to harmonize his structure and its surroundings, either esthetically or functionally.” Originally, Arcosanti was designed to be a 20-story, rectangular structure made out of concrete, which would’ve been a marked departure from the prevailing styles of the region that tended to lie low and close to the ground to leave the mountainous landscape unspoiled (some neighborhoods, like Paradise Valley, has all utilities in a subterranean level). The design also employed the circle as a frequent motif: it is said that Soleri was fond of circles, as they symbolized the sun and the moon. The circular cutouts are omnipresent in walls, entryways, and windows; it’s in the production studios, which lie under enormous apses (semicircular domes).
Every inch of Arcosanti was built by the hands of Soleri’s students and volunteers, none of whom were paid. Apartment units were built alongside multiuse common spaces, like a gym, a laundry room, and a library that doubles as a free second-hand shop. Greenhouses and “food forests”—composed of naturally layered edible crops that utilize fewer external inputs, like fertilizers and herbicides—were constructed with the intention of feeding the residents.
Today, Arcosanti remains only five percent completed, with 40-some residents dwelling on its grounds. Sue Kirsch, the Archives Manager who has been living on and off the site since 1978, told me that the largest number of residents might have been around 80 people. The greenhouses and the food forest don’t produce enough food to feed all the residents—which is partially due to the fact that there aren’t enough people to cultivate the crops—so they are obliged to make the 45-minute trek to Prescott, the nearest town, to stock up on groceries.
The low occupancy rate makes the living grounds eerily quiet—so quiet, in fact, that most of the time, the only sounds you hear are your own footsteps shuffling across the concrete floor. When there’s a breeze, the bronze bells that hang from trees ring through the hot, hollow air. The silence is only broken by the periodic firing of the furnace in the bronze foundry and the occasional bursts of visitors traversing the grounds in a tour group (the tour, and an overnight stay, is the only way for the general public to see the grounds of Arcosanti).
The bronze foundry and the ceramic studio are active working environments and are used by residents who produce bronze bells and various ceramic wares. The foundry and the studio are at a stone’s throw from the residential units, and ArcoMart, a former store-turned-bar with phosphorescent interiors and refrigerated beers. This means that residents at Arcosanti live, work, and socialize with each other in close proximity.
Even with only 40 residents, this arrangement requires intense social connectivity that is more or less constant—and that comes with its pros and cons. The peculiar sense of urban loneliness is almost vanquished at Arcosanti, but this comes at the expense of personal privacy. Social drama, conflict, and gossip are inevitable. “Maybe the pros and the cons are supposed to even out,” Taylor Morgan, the Education Manager at Arcosanti, told me. “Maybe there shouldn’t be an off-switch to being around others.”
The social connections made at Arcosanti seem to be incredibly resilient and long-lasting. Ivan Fritz and Jen Thornton, colleagues at the Cosanti Foundation and partners in life, still keep in touch with the friends they made on the site in the early 2000s, even though all of them had now left and dispersed across the country. “They sort of become your family,” Jen told me. “Even the ones you don’t get along with so well—it’s kind of like that crazy uncle you meet at the family gathering during Christmas.”
However, the idea of constant social connections did not enthuse Soleri. By many accounts, he was a private, reclusive person who did not interact with his students and volunteers beyond the instructional realm. Instead, he devoted his energies to writing and sketching, long-distance swimming and jogging, and carving thousands of Styrofoam models by hand.
A Complicated Legacy
Paolo Soleri passed away at Cosanti in 2013. Four years after his death, his second daughter, Daniela Soleri, published an essay claiming that her father sexually abused her and eventually tried to rape her when she was seventeen years old. The Cosanti Foundation, which oversees Cosanti, Arcosanti, and Soleri’s works, has grappled with ways to come into terms with this development; before they could come up with a sustainable way forward, COVID-19 triggered an exodus of residents from Arcosanti.
The question is an existential one: can the shortcomings of the artist be separated from the legacy of their work? In 2018, the Cosanti Foundation put forth a statement that the public should “distinguish the work from the man, celebrate his ideas by using them to make a better world, and acknowledge (again) that to support great ideas is not to condone the conduct of their creator.”
But Daniela argued that the failure of her father and the standstill of Arcosanti are intertwined: “I believe that the same hubris and isolation that contributed to my abuse also made him, and some of his coterie, incapable of sustained engagement with the intellectual and artistic worlds they felt neglected by,” she told The Guardian.
Perhaps it’s the artificial, collective isolation of Arcosanti that prevents its broader appeal. Instead of improving the preexisting ways of urban life, it sought to build a completely separate alternative—an act that was, no doubt, partly fueled by Soleri’s egoism.
More sustainable and socially connected living is possible within the larger urban fabric. Just 70 miles south in Scottsdale, examples of such efforts exist: David Hovey and his firm Optima design LEED-certified buildings with innovative, energy-efficient features that irrigate its abundance of lush plant life and minimize the presence of automobiles. At the Cattle Track Arts Compound, artists live and work together, nourishing a rich, familial bond with one another. At Anticus, a downtown Scottsdale art gallery that functions as a multi-use space, events like wine tastings and readings bring the local community together.
At ArcoMart, surrounded by glow-in-the-dark paints and holding a sweaty beer, I spoke to Jen about New York City, where many residential buildings come with third spaces—a communal space that is distinct from the home or work—like rooftops, gyms, and co-working areas, that allow opportunities to congregate and connect. “My father took the lead in organizing weekly rooftop gatherings for residents,” she said. “That would be an opportunity for them to socialize and get to know each other and cultivate the kind of community that is similar to this.”
Still, there is an unparalleled sense of raw beauty that can only be found in the high desert. The sun sets early on Arcosanti grounds, and when I returned to my suite, the inky night sky was scattered with bright, glistening stars. The Big Dipper was the clearest that I’ve ever seen it—and looking up, I wondered if the frenetic pace of urban life made us lose things that we weren’t even aware of losing. When had been the last time I felt the absence of stars? And so I knew that, even without answers to the larger questions, the Big Dipper, sparkling like gemstones, would be reason enough to come back to the desert.