Arcosanti

“My initiative—and it has been part of my [philosophical] makeup—was to try to work in a somehow passive way in making use of the climate. I’m still very much attached to that. And one reason is that when we develop a very elaborate technology to [create a] green building, somehow we are trying to take away some of the beauty of the organism—of the human being—and consign it to technology. Things that we can do—that the human organism has been doing for millions of years—we tend now to believe that we can serve them better with technology. So we are developing what you might call a very artificial condition.” - Paolo Soleri

Arcosanti sits five percent complete; an otherworldly series of structures peppering the rocky walls of a small gorge in the Arizona desert. Browns, greys and beiges, chalk and concrete, surprisingly green, remarkably open to the world surrounding it.

We arrive just in time for sunset, the kitchen porter calls “suns up” and the academics, apprentices and residents leave their plates and casually gather around the large round windows to watch the sky morph and change colour.

It was quite the introduction.

We sat in the dark a while.

The brainchild of Italian architect Paolo Soleri – a fascinating, scandalised visionary, Arcosanti represents his truest, unbridled attempt at utopia. Underpinned by his own ‘arcology’ ideology (a portmanteau of ’architecture’ and ‘ecology’) the site attracts visitors from all over the world for a variety of reasons, most commonly, curiosity.

We were drawn to the absolute oddity of the place. Others come to make bells. Some stay for months (even years) doing their part to extend the vision.

Having moved from Italy to study under Frank Lloyd Wright at his famous Taliesin III ranch in the 1940’s, Soleri began shaping an alternative blueprint for urban living; a compact (but also architecturally FLAMBOYANT) city model centred around sustainability and social interaction. The vision is what science fiction dreams are made of and as we wander the halls, residences, ampitheatres, recording studios, bell foundries and vegetable gardens we are entirely taken aback by the unique spirit and vast ambition around every turn.

A man wearing a blue felt wizard hat plays piano into the night.

We wake and walk the half dozen sets of steps up the hill to breakfast. A team of volunteers work on bringing an ageing set of solar panels back to life. In the visitor centre a series of large perspex framed images illustrate the future plans for Arcosanti, an expansive utopia; the final phase housing 5000 people and dwarfing the current structures in vast concrete waves.

In the meantime, and at all times, the molten bronze bells chime in the wind.