On Art

...Seemingly, each arcology would be as self-sufficient as an old Maine farm...

...The Maine farm, however, represents an interesting architectural model...

...With grants from other foundations and more elaborate experimental construction techniques, the complex has expanded considerably to include workshops, dormitories, a swimming pool, and a foundry for producing the Soleri-designed wind chimes which provide financial support for the operation...

...In the past, in the days before ready-made architecture, preplanned housing developments and conveniently bulldozed building lots, the architecture of a house was shaped by local styles, the local site and private needs...

...Of necessity, it was a self-sustaining unit...

...The outer skin of these vast structures would be comprised of housing units linked to neighborhood schools, stores and churches...

...They would use what he terms "cosmic potentials," harnessing the sun, the wind and the tides to provide power...

...This summer, Soleri and his disciples embarked upon a project for putting his theories into action...

...Its purpose is to protect its human occupants--theoretically for a lifetime--providing comfort and privacy against the vagaries of climate and society...

...Of the various responses to urban sprawl, the visionary architecture of Paolo Soleri represents the ultimate in packaging...

...Those industrial plants in need of human operators would be consigned to the outskirts of the arcology, where the workers would have light and air and the industrial waste products could be efficiently and economically reprocessed in shared detoxification plants...

...Ordinarily they began as simple boxes fronting the streets...

...The family, too, is plugged into a vast complex of services and commodities--the distribution mechanisms of the chain supermarkets, for example, carrying their loads of tasteless, chemically-preserved breads, their frozen Florida beans and California-canned peas to Ma-chias, Maine...

...Nor are Soleri's arcologies visionary schemes of the wild-blue-yonder variety...

...It is only when a breakdown occurs--a transportation strike, a major blackout, summer brownouts--that one begins to recognize how widespread, vulnerable and interdependent the entire system has become, and how inexorably and haphazardly it is expanding...

...His visionary cities, with names such as Babel, Stonebow, Arcube, would rise like gigantic beehives, accommodating populations of 1-2 million in their efficiently ordered mega-structure...

...The houses are occupied, but the rather run-down condition of the farms, the derelict equipment parked everywhere, the decaying sheds left to fall down of their own accord, lead one to suspect that the struggling and isolated farmer of the 19th century--like his modern counterpart--was not concerned with the niceties of landscaping...

...One can still find in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, for instance, enough surviving examples of 17th- and 18th-century homes to afford some insights into a time when it could be said that the architecture of a house grew up around the family it contained--as opposed to the present situation, in which the family must conform to a prepackaged structure...

...These are generally located atop rolling hills, surveying extensive plots that have not yet fallen to the real-estate men...

...But perhaps this only indicates that Soleri's dream cities do represent the shape of things to come...

...In most of their basics, they represent projections--on the grand scale--of already existing technologies and methods...

...He has coined the term "arcologies" for his high-density, architectural-ecological population centers, designed to compress the currently amorphous city into towering structures--giant cubes and pyramids 300 stories high--that would leave the surrounding countryside to nature, to pleasant vacation resorts and preserved, historic towns...

...These utilities have annexed the private house to the spreading network of population centers and their sprawling dependencies...

...It is here--aside from the staggering engineering problems involved in building the structures--that one begins to see a few cracks in the dream world...

...The problems of outfitting a million inhabitants with rental equipment in good working order might well prove insurmountable, considering the fact that maintaining a comparatively few Long Island, railroad cars in functioning order is already an impossible task...

...ground for cultivation of the family food supply and the crops sold at market...

...since the scale of the megastructures would be immense, these could be constructed as individual buildings...

...Land was vital: woodlots for fuel...

...There, on back country roads and some of the smaller highways, one comes upon a surprising collection of houses and adjacent sheds attached to large and deteriorating barns...

...To avoid wasteful overproduction...

...I doubt that I would want to live in Babel any more than I would want to live in an efficiency apartment...

...It will be a small working model of Soleri's grandiose dream cities...

...The monastic analogy is not altogether fanciful, since Soleri has developed a community of sorts--for work, if not for prayer--in the Arizona desert...

...It now accommodates about 100 students and apprentices who are provided with grocery money and the master's architectural theories...

...sufficient acreage for fodder and pasturage...

...In time, new wings, larger kitchens, extra rooms were added, registering the growth of the family--the married sons and daughters who took up residence with their parents, relatives forced by circumstances to move in with their next of kin...

...None of these projects has yet been built, so the two recently concluded exhibitions devoted to Soleri's work--one at the Whitney Museum, the other at the Reese Palley Gallery--consisted entirely of scale models and drawings of his urban complexes...

...The centers would be given over to public facilities, offices, museums, universities, and hospitals...

...Eventually, sizeable family communities were sheltered under the collective roof...

...The 19th-century family house is now at the receiving end of all the conglomerate services signifying a technologically advanced civilization--city water, city sewage, telephone, the power and light companies...

...The Cosanti Foundation has acquired 800 acres of land in central Arizona, where it proposes to build--with whatever funds become available--a model city called Arcosanti...

...Soleri even proposes that tools, equipment, household appliances, and furniture be supplied to the inhabitants on a rental basis...

...I confess I'm more in sympathy with the irate hippie who stormed out of an explanatory lecture at the Whitney shouting, "You're trying to make a fucking ant out of me...

...Even the automobile has been carried over, albeit in a subservient role...

...Some of these farms still have old burial plots set out on the edges of their now-abandoned fields, testimony to their original distance from the normal services of villages and towns...

...There remain, of course, very few family units that are so self-sustaining...

...Inner-city transportation would consist of elevators, escalators, moving sidewalks, and electrically powered vehicles built into the structure...

...The troublesome automobile would be banished to the outer limits of the city and to basement parking lots...

...Automated industries would be located at the base of the structure-ground level or below...

...In Maine, as another architectural instance, one can glimpse vestiges of 19th-century rural America, before the advent of railroads and automobiles...

...To be sure, such early houses reflected a settled way of life and much more stable communities...

...The arrangement allowed the farmer to get to his livestock without shoveling through 10-foot drifts of snow...

...For the past 12 years he has been working on these sketchbooks like a medieval scholar elaborating upon Biblical texts in his cell...

...The planning of the house--interconnecting tack rooms, keeping rooms and stables all leading to the barn--was an acknowledgment of the severe northern winters...

...Indeed, the entire farm complex was built to withstand the rigors of the climate, for during the winter months the family was even more isolated and had therefore to be even more self-sufficient...

...Soleri views man as a gregarious animal, destined by technology to live and work out his life within an urban environment...

...They also included examples of the architect's sketchbooks, some of them 50- to 100-foot scrolls, covered with detailed drawings, written commentaries and obiter dicta ("Life is the [qualified] thick of things...

...Soleri, 51, Italian-born and a former student of Frank Lloyd Wright, dreams of preplanning whole cities...

...Only eight acres wide and 130 feet high, it will leave the remaining land as a town park and recreational area...

...they work up detailed drawings for Soleri's constantly evolving dream cities and do occasional service in the foundry...

...With the population explosion in mind, architects and planners foresee a time when the entire surface of the country will be covered with giant cities, industrial parks and connective suburbs...

...What Soleri's vision lacks, it seems to me, is a proper respect for the crabbedness of human nature--its waywardness, its persistence in old habits, its pride of possession...

...Now established as the Cosanti Foundation, it was begun less ambitiously 14 years ago in Scottsdale, with the building of an "earth house" whose walls were formed by concrete poured over earth mounds that were removed after the concrete had cured...

...They were built--like the principal items of furniture they held--to last not one lifetime but several...