Walt Lockley

Paolo Soleri, Baron of the Unreal

Sky Suite, Arcosanti, Mayer Arizona

In case you don't know, Arcosanti is a lost-cause utopian community about 60
miles north of Phoenix, visible from I-17, about 1/3 of 1% complete. It's the
kernel of an 'arcology', a massive megastructure meant to efficiently house
thousands of people beehive style, this one is specifically the desert arcology.
But after (let's see, Paolo Soleri got kicked out of Taliesin West about 1948.....)
decades of grueling work in the desert, only a fragment exists. To those
looking for a city of the future, Paolo extends his arcologies.

Naturally the gift shop is finished.

Paolo is easy sport because he's short and 80ish and quite Italian and tends, in
lectures, to drift off talking about his all-encompassing bubble diagram, or
what happens after humans leave the carbon experience ("we probably won't
need architects anymore"), and because Arcosanti tends to be populated by
hippies, dreamers, and rainbow-knit-cap wearers. They come down and attend
his lectures in packs you can detect around the corner.

We all made nervous jokes about seeing Paolo Soleri in person, running him or
up down, using a code name for him ("Mena"), cursing him, trying to guess his
parking space, speculating about his sexual opportunities, sneaking around
under his suite on the east end of the property. You know, the part with the
swimming pool. Plenty of mileage, too, about his nude sketching. He's done
Matt's Mom evidently (and Courtney should do it).

And he once said, "If any of my proposals were seriously adopted, the
economy would collapse." Shrug.

But now my professional opinion is that Arcosanti is cool. And Paolo does not
deserve our ignorant abuse. He's a fuckin' baron of the unreal. As a set of
spaces Arcosanti is complicated and compelling, with interlocking living areas,
brilliantly designed around human capabilities, unfinished and already partly
ruined, and endlessly photogenic and explorable. It feels like a technological
pioneer settlement, like a moon base. It's dreamlike. Maybe it's the Italian
cypresses. The grounds include a three-story bakery and visitor's center and
café, a half-dome work area (they cast bells there, short trip to the gift shop)
cleverly oriented towards the sun, an ampitheatre, Soleri's suite, offices and
classrooms, many living quarters, and the weirdest gradations between public
and private space. It's sort of like a stage, or a commune, but you couldn't
really seriously live here with 4999 other people for very long without getting
all tangled up in your neighbor's butthair. Hopefully you'd learn to enjoy it.
Only 55 spent the night tonight, they said.

The Sky Suite sleeps 8 in the summer, sits at the highest point in the complex
over the whole angular moon-base and its weird buttresses, these are Skybox
seats overlooking Paolo's imaginary weed field and pipedream cemetery, the
architecture is functional and smart and humane, and encourages the loosest
kind of hanging out, the kind where you put mats and blankets down on the
floor and roll around wrestling and bumping each other like giddy 7-year-olds.
And we climbed up on the roof, and explored the off-limits areas, and like that.
You wonder what it's going to look like 20, 30 years from now.

And the suite itself is brilliant. Some of the things I think about the interplay of
residential spaces and human relationships, especially when it comes to levels, seating surfaces,
human posture and body language, Paolo solved those problems years ago.

The multilevels and the platforms in the living room, humane smooth concrete and
wooden floor surfaces, invited you to stretch out and sit in adventurous
ways. Platforms obviously okay for stocking feet. Wooden platform up above
the sink, too. The very shape of the room is ingeniously functional from a
social / seating point of view. Accommodates expressive body language. You
could easily sleep on these platforms in the right weather, or with the fiery gas
heat turned up high. I liked standing with my back to the cold windows
because the higher air was warm and it was fun to look down into the kitchen
from this height, then turn around and face outside and examine the prospects
for survival on an Italian moon base with a monster loose - not good. A suite
enjoyable to pace through, like a glassy panther cage for humans, a nice setting
for pacing and lounging and claiming territory and coupling. And despite
having two bedrooms at our disposal, we all felt comfortable sleeping out there.

It was so fun on that platform up above the sink. This would be a great place
to be a kid.

The space was socially flexible. You could have been cocktail-dress formal
there, I guess, or gone our direction and dragged the steps away, put the
kindergarten mats down and blankets on top, "Pillows!" someone said, and we
made a playpit. We invented and played the "I could drop off that and survive"
game. At one point we were rolling off the higher shelf, and then rolling and
bumping into each other and drinking precious cherry cordial from the bottle,
and playing dominos and Uno, then all piling into each other, to going to sleep.
At one point.

Ingenious cubbyholes, right where you needed them. The ones in the bedroom
made the most sense, built-in and flexible (with shelves that rest on movable
pegs, an approach so logical it's like the answer to one of those child's deadly-
simple questions about why aren't things like this?). The whole thing was
clever as hell. The ingenious space-saving cabinet. The entryway table
straddled a riser, with different heights of chairs on either side, solving a couple
of spatial problems at once. We saw two Ethernet connections and a cable t.v.
cable. The lighting, smart and variable, dimmers. All this in 600 square feet.

Only three curved elements I remember, all conspicuous, correctly scaled, and
humanizing (and cheap). You couldn't ask for more from three curves,
especially the implied grander scale of that big concrete circle outside. It felt
nice, expansive, to pace back and forth up there on the prospect and look across
the canyon and the cold air to the truck stop. I think the variations of scale are
one of the most beautiful things about Arcosanti. Paolo Soleri is the fuckin'
baron of the unreal, and I mean that as the highest complement.