Paolo Soleri, born in Turin, is one of the greatest interpreters of urban utopia. He is considered to be a Green Prophet who has created a sustainable alternative to the hypothesis of urban habitats, based on his Arcology, a discipline combining architecture and ecology. His concept of the ideal city became a reality on a desert plateau in Arizona, in an area located between Phoenix and the Grand Canyon. There, since 1970, Soleri began constructing Arcosanti, his ideal urban establishment for preserving the natural habitat, reducing the consumption of energy sources and limiting the natural propensity of people to isolation. This unique urban concentration is stratified, in contrast with modern cities that only focus on extensive territory exploitation.
Q: "Over the last few years, awareness on sustainable issues has widely increased. However, your theories on ecological architecture were born 50 years ago. What do they mean for you today?"
A: Probably, my concept of sustainability differs greatly from the current fashionable term that influences our lifestyle and behaviour. The importance of environmental sustainability lays within the phenomenon of life itself, and this is not a new issue, it is indeed very old... However, due to mankind’s impact upon the environment, we have arrived to a moment of crisis, where all transformations have become very rapid and often traumatic. We do not know what will happen in the future. My way of facing this problem now, is to reduce our demands, our expectancies, our destructive impact on nature, our overconsumption desire... I strongly believe that wealth is not a matter of having more, but of needing less. Especially in this country, America, the materialistic trend will reach such levels that it will end up colliding with reality, causing a collapse.
Q: "Can Arcosanti be considered a possible sustainable city model?"
A: First of all, Arcosanti resembles a village more than a city, therefore quite modest in size: there are approximately eighty people living there, besides students, researchers and volunteers who work in the construction of new buildings. More than 5,000 volunteers have worked on the project, since the very beginning. Our main objective has always been to create an alternative solution to the growing consumerism of society, and after so many years the principle has never changed. My attempt is to try to communicate a concept, in a very simple way, through design: beauty and the essence of life does not come from owning something or from frantic shopping. Nowadays, it seems as though the pleasure of buying has become lgreater than the pleasure of using. For instance, I don’t go around saying “hey, listen, do what I tell you to do because I’m giving you salvation...” Forget it! My research and my work are focused on "what if" scenarios, that is, what can we achieve by changing our habits and our demands? I'm not seeking for truth, but I look for hypotheses that can help.
Q: "What is the future city going to look like?"
A: The problem is that modern cities transform the landscape radically, producing enormous amounts of waste and consume time and energy in transporting goods and services to places where expansion majorly takes place. Therefore, my proposal does not lead to an explosion but to an urban implosion. A compact city. Arcology can theoretically provide positive answers to many urbanization problems, such as population growth, pollution, energy consumption, food shortages, life quality...
Q: "Many of your workshop partcipants decided to take part in the construction of Arcosanti; several chose to live there and consider you as a reference point, as their guide or teacher. What did you actually teach them?"
A: Architects of today, often want to prove their greatness; a good architect tends to produce what I call an "orchid", with the most beautiful structure that you can immagine. But we are about 6 / 7 billion people today, all searching for a roof, and to produce billions of "orchids" makes no sense at all. We need to create what society needs, not what the individual believes that he needs. This is my lesson.
Q: "You have been dedicating half a century to this project, making the american dream come true. But … will Arcosanti ever be completed?"
A: ... Forget it!
A: ... Forget it!
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