Arcosanti
Originally Published April 3, 2022
The Aquarian Mountains run north-south, parallel to a line connecting Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen with Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti. Both were visionary projects, schools and utopian models for society, and in fact, Paolo Soleri spent a year and a half at Taliesen early in his career. He and his wife eventually settled in Scottsdale Arizona, founding the Cosanti Studio in 1956, and Arcosanti in 1970. *
Today, however, Arcosanti thrives as an artisanal community, largely committed to the principles upon which it was founded, centered on arcology, a structured relationship to ecology formed by minimizing the impact of urban communities. While the residents number only in the double digits, far below the 5,000 originally envisioned, the core that remain are committed to a sustainable way of living. They grow their own food, make and sell the ceramic and bronze bells to support the school. The day we visited we were given a tour by a young artist who after her first year of apprenticeship was now learning to cast bronze. When someone in our tour group asked about "governance" our guide seemed perplexed, as if to say, "You're asking the wrong question."
Like so many ventures of the 1970's, Biosphere 2 for example, Arcosanti is sometimes seen as merely a commune with no scalable significance. Yet it's hard to deny the charm of the place, and that of its inhabitants. It is essentially an Italian hill town, and operates much in the same way, free of the automobile, of the commute, of the meaningless separation that characterizes so much of modern American civilization. Founded in 1970, the same year as Earth Day, it represents an aspiration and a path surely better than the one we are on now.
Soleri's reputation has been reconsidered after revelations in 2017 by his youngest daughter regarding his sexual abuse. These revelations may not have come entirely as a surprise, as Soleri had abruptly resigned from the Cosanti Foundation in 2011.