Educators TOOLBOX
Art & Ecology


Art & Ecology:

Perspectives and Issues



Environmental Design

Paolo Soleri, Arcosanti

by Ron Neperud

Within a philosophical system, Soleri takes an ecological approach to environmental design in which space is integrated with living, learning,and working based on three principles: complexity, miniaturization, and duration.

Paolo Soleri views community as a living organism which succeeds if "it is congruent with the complexity-miniaturization-duration paradigm" (p. 11). At Arcosanti, near Phoenix, Arizona, Soleri and associates have established a living community based on this paradigm. Containment within a social milieu provides the habitat for growth. Soleri asks, "What of the human dimension of culture and spirit? Containment or diaspora?" (Soleri, 1987, p. 12).

Soleri believes that ecology depends upon the maintenance of centers of life that are so intense that they contain within them the bulk of populations. The countryside sustains urban areas, for there is no division between the two. Arcosanti endorses intense urbanization as the methodology to achieve his paradigm of complexity, miniaturization, and duration. The integration of living, learning, and working are the goals of the Arcosanti project. Aesthetics dominate over structure and technology. This aim, or aesthetogenesis, is achieved when all means become ends, with all individuals involved in aesthetic/art enterprises. The arcology, architecture and ecology, is the city created in the image of humans, a city which, because it is so integrated ecologically, is congruent with natural ecology. It is argued that Arcosanti as the example of arcology has among its advantages there integrationof multigenerational families, the elimination of country folks/city dwellers confrontations, the achievement of identity and a sense of place, and greater self-reliance, if not complete self-sufficiency. Arcosanti supports a numberof activities designed to provide sale items as well as those needed bythe project: making of bells, maintaining greenhouses, publishing, gardening, guest housing, elderhostels, and residences for Arcosanti participants.

Arcosanti and arcology have been criticized for excessively utopian goals: technically and realistically, arcology cannot be achieved. Arcology serves as an environmental design model uniting architecture and ecology, analternative to conventional and existing uses of space and resources. Arcosanti is dependent upon the labor of residents who are rewarded only in the sense of living within that system, and as a result seem to be exploited rather than living the good life and achieving aesthetogenesis.

Questions

References

Soleri, P. (1973). The bridge between matter & spirit is matter becoming spirit. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Soleri, P. (1970). Arcology: City in the image of man. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Soleri, P. (1971). The sketchbooks of Paolo Soleri. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Soleri, P. (1987). Arcosanti, An urban Laboratory? VTI Press.

Resources

Arcosanti Web site (includes information on Paolo Soleri)










© 2006 greenmuseum.org