Walt Lockley - Travel Pieces

at the feet of the Master (and desperate for a
cold beer)

written December 2000

Pros: Soleri is a stylish, smart old cat
Cons: you don't walk away with much you can use

I saw Paolo Soleri speak last week. I'm going to
assume you know the backstory here;
how the Soleri renegade Wright-student megastructural
experimental utopian college-kid-slave-labor bell factory in the
Arizona desert is doomed to failure by its impractical
contradictions.

(Oh, sorry about that last sentence. How terrible for you, trying
to make sense of that.)

Arcosanti is too much like Southwest Airlines and Iraq. When
the guy in charge gets his heart attack, the whole thing's going
to collapse. And there's truth in that, I think.
It's an inherently enterprise, a lost cause, a theoretical dead end.

But I think there's another side to this. Soleri and Acrosanti are
both paradoxes, contradictory enterprises, and I've made fun of
them a lot in the past. It's all how you explain it to people who
haven't heard about it -- you know, you could take the
approach, there's this effin' Italian nut out in the desert, building
a 3-D hyperdense futuristic tower city that he's .07 percent done
with, he has no hope of commercial sponsorship, it's an
egotistical folly.

Or you can look at it as sort of an odd thing of beauty.

Like I said, I saw Soleri speak last week. I saw him speak once
before, years ago, in Memphis at a college. He was taken
advantage of by someone else on the schedule (Stewart Brand, I
think) and shuffled to the last spot in the program on the last
night, and he couldn't speak English well, and he fumbled through
his slides, and I was part of the 4/5 of the audience who
wandered off to find some beer and beat the crowd. (Cruel, huh?
Outgunned by Stewart Brand.)

And even today, even last week, when invited to a community
meeting on urban sprawl, he doesn't prepare a lecture, he brings
somebody to interview him. That's better, yeah, but weird.

He looks much better than he did 15 years old. He's a sexy old
guy, mid-70's I think. (No, wait, I'll look it up -- 81. Born in 1919.)
Big expressive eyes, an engaging sense of humor, and attractive
sense of futility.

And then you find out, Paolo doesn't really answer questions, or
stay on topic. He could use a handler if he wants to be effective
in meetings like this. Frustrating for me. I could have leapt up,
made a case for Arcosanti as the opposite of sprawl, as the other
end of the urban design continuum from sprawl, like this --

Arcosanti is a hyperdense, cooperative, environmentally
responsible, ped-oriented, efficient, sustainable, totalitarian
(admit it), 3-D design.

The Urban Sprawl we're stuck with, especially in LA and Phoenix,
is a spawling (duh), competitive, environmentally catastrophic,
auto-oriented, hyper-inefficient, clearly unsustainable, sort-of
democratic, 2-D non-design. And we'd better be careful before
we export our lifestyle to China and India, cause it would take 39
more earths to sustain THAT with 25 years or so.

But Paolo didn't even get this far.

For minutes on end, Paolo's talking along in his paternal Italian
voice, making expressions like a mischevious old-neighborhood
bocca player, meandering, talking about the sun exploding
someday, and how our race would have hopefully moved from 'the
carbon experience' (living in bodies) into the silicon experience.
And how such a race could survive the sun going nova. And how,
at that point, architects would probably no longer be needed.
Honestly -- he said all that.

This time, only about 1/2 of the audience wandered off to sleep.
This is a crowd at least interested enough to show up, but he
lost all but about 30 people out of 250 or so.

I managed to stay awake by wondering what would happen if
Arcosanti were finished, by some black old-neighborhood magic,
at the end of next week. And it was ready for occupation, for
30,000 people who would be living and breathing and copulating
in one single tower, most of the residential rooms windowless, the
huge experimental ventilation and sewage and water and other
life support systems still untested (and of Italian design), and the
whole thing looking like Logan's Run on the inside. How the
population densities would be equivalent to the Shanghai
docklands. I wonder what would happen if you took a
cross-section of 30,000 Phoenix residents and plugged them into
that living space.

I know what would happen! After two weeks, we'd burn the damn
thing down and riot in the streets! (Or wait, I forgot, there
wouldn't be any streets. Well then we'd riot in the breezeways!)
Either a fire, or else everything would get real quiet, and six or
seven badasses in serapes would come riding out of the ruins of
Arcosanti on horseback and start taking hostages back in.

That would make the national news, I think.

But if you take the trouble to drive up there, on that rough gravel
road, Arcosanti is undeniably beautiful. Cinematic. It reminds me
of the Planet of the Apes, or the little hippie-utopian village at
the beginning of the last Star Trek movie. Or the next-to-last
one. It's very 70's, very collegiate and Aspen-style somehow,
sort of retrofuturistic now. As a space, it's a lot more
human-scaled and a lot more moody than I'd expected. It looks
like a technological pioneer settlement, if that makes sense.

And, you know, Soleri is topical these days. The sprawl
conversation hit Scientific American this month. It's getting
worse. (And L.A. is like a museum of sprawl. L.A. has a multiple
historical layers of bad decisions.) So things might go back
Soleri's way pretty soon -- if he could only convey his ideas.
What a paradox.

And he's not going to get any help from the private sector any
time soon. That's the killer issue. That's the thing that dooms
Arcosanti. It's not commercially attractive to anybody.

As he said with a shrug, "If any of my proposals were seriously
adopted, the economy would collapse." He delivered this line with
a confidence in his own timing, like Alan King almost, like a
practiced old comedian.