I'm Jeff Stein. I'm a co-president of the Cosanti Foundation. Arcosanti is meant to
be a demonstration project of the idea of arcology, architecture and ecology
as two parts of a single entity which by the way with 8 billion of us on the
planet living in buildings architecture and ecology are two parts of a single
entity although the architecture part is pretty much a drag on the living ecology
part. In the 1960's Paolo Soleri had a kind of an "aha" moment about cities. First
of all they're sort of the container for human social evolution and second of all
if they're only a few stories thick spreading out for hundreds of square
miles as Phoenix does 900 square miles of pretty much single-story houses it
isn't going to be very sustainable. In most American cities 50 to 60 percent of
the land mass is covered by roads and streets and parking lots and alleys
things that we hope will connect us through our use of machines but in
reality separate us in space. Our idea here at Arcosanti is to demonstrate how
a town could be organized three dimensionally, compact, complex, not
spreading out for hundreds of acres or even hundreds of square miles but
contained so that we might figure out how 8 billion of us humans are going to
share the planet and how we're going to share it with the hundreds of millions
of other species with whom we've co-evolved so Arcosanti is trying to
demonstrate another way of inhabiting the planet.
Hi my name is Shannon and
welcome to Arcosanti an urban laboratory in the high desert
of Arizona about 60 miles north of Phoenix.
So we are headed into the Crafts 3
building one floor up from where we are now is a visitor center and one
floor below us is the cafe at Arcosanti. We are here in the Arcosanti visitor
center. Out of the visitor center we sell the famous Soleri wind bells in bronze
and in ceramic.
This is the cafe at Arcosanti. It is the open mezzanine in the middle of the
Crafts 3 building. We offer three meals a day open to the public.
We are at the
bottom of the crafts 3 building, the building with the cafe and the visitor
center. A lot of the architecture here at Arcosanti is focused on the idea of
mixed-use space so the craft 3 building has the commercial bell
production sales and the visitor center at the very top. The cafe is the second
craft and then at the very bottom of this building in the last two stories we
have residential spaces so the building has a use 24 hours a day. We have a
couple of different kinds of living spaces that you can get into when you
become a resident here at Arcosanti. Something that's very common is a co
housing unit. A co housing unit will have four or five different bedrooms to one
or two different living room spaces a kitchen and a bathroom shared by all of
the people that live in that space. Here we have our visitors trail. Our visitors
trail takes you all the way to the far Mesa and gives you a full iconic skyline
of Arcosanti. We own eight hundred and sixty acres.
We also lease an additional 3,200 acres from the state of Arizona bringing our
total preserve to about four thousand acres.
Here we are at the Arcosanti bronze foundry. We have a foundry here at Arcosanti.
We also have one at our sister location in Scottsdale, Arizona, Cosanti.
The bell making process starts with what's underneath that tarp called
foundry sand. We start with a two-part mold. The sand is packed into both halves
around the steel and aluminium form which provides the bell shape and then they
put it into a compressor which compresses the sand with about a hundred
and fifty pounds of pressure and at that point they can remove the steel and
aluminum form from the center so that there's just empty space between the two
halves of sand. They pour the bronze about three times a day during the week.
We invite visitors to come and watch the artisans pour the molten bronze. We heat
up the bronze in a furnace inside of a crucible somewhere around 2200 degrees
Fahrenheit. They'll pour in the morning and around 1:00 p.m. In the afternoon
they come and they break out the molds and the bells from there get finished.
The bronze foundry is inside of the apse structure behind me. The structure has
studio spaces on the first floor and then on the second floor there are
windows into the residential spaces built behind and above the workspaces.
Down here we have a furnace where we heat the bronze in and then above the
furnace there's a hood. Inside of that hood there's a canal that's open in the
winter that funnels the excess heat from the furnace into the flooring of the two
apartments above it. We have two apse structures here on site.
A-p-s-e it's a technical term for a quarter of a sphere very similar to the half
shell theater in Boston. Behind me is a ceramic studio where we make the ceramic
wind bells which is a silt casting process. Our clay comes to us in a very
dry and rocky form and we break it down and process it into liquid clay or slip.
We use it in plaster molds like this two-part mold and in silt beds like the
one here. Almost every single structure that you'll see today has a residential
space built into it. The ceramic apse there was somebody living in it for the
first three years and was built in 1973. It's not very safe to live in a ceramic
studio though so it's one of our only structures that doesn't have residential
space however we do have a small wooden stage that we put on top of the
workspace here so we're able to use this space as an amphitheater for different
events that we have throughout the year.
We are in the Kali Soleri gardens, garden space that's dedicated to Paolo Soleri's
wife Kali. We have this idea that you're able to have a lawn that is big and
luscious and green but at Arcosanti everybody doesn't need their own lawn we
share one and we also water the lawn and keep grass here in the high desert of
Arizona by recycling our water with a grey water system that takes water from
sinks and showers and our residential areas in the east crescent and puts it
back into the landscape. Here we are in the vault or the vaulted archers. The
structure I'm standing under right now was a very first completed structure
here, started in 1970 and finished in 1972, and it was primarily
first used as shaded workspace. Our entire site is south-facing to take
advantage of the direction of the Sun throughout the year. Most of our
structures are made out of concrete so as the Sun passes very low in the
southern sky in the winter heating the concrete and heating the space as much
as 15 degrees alternatively that when the Sun passes very high in the sky in
the summertime our arches here and the apse structures are able to cast shade
over the work areas beneath making it a more habitable space throughout the year.
This line is the line that marks the least amount of Sun that makes it into
the space during the summer time. The line back here which marks the most
amount of Sun that gets in the winter solstice. Back here we have the lab
building which is our indoor work space. Out of the lab building we have our
maintenance department, our electrical, and our plumbing. We also have a full
woodshop in here with tools and a metal shop where we can weld to build
anything that we're working on in construction. Our residents also have the
ability to use all the equipment in their free time. The second story here
has open spaces that residents can apply for it to use as personal storage or
artist studio spaces. We also have a community sewing studio, a screen
printing studio, and a second ceramic studio that has Potter's wheels that
residents and visitors are able to utilize. This is our amphitheater. It is
our largest performance space that we have that can fit up to 500 people and
it's nestled within the larger structure around us which is the East Crescent and
the East Crescent is intended to be a very prime example of mixed-use space
working in residential space. In this half of the Crescent we have on the
second story three co-housing units four or five bedrooms, one or two bathrooms
one or two living rooms, and a kitchen space shared by all those people. On the
very top floor we have more private residential spaces more like studio
apartments or larger apartments where families will live. So out here you can
see our pool which has an Olympic length of lane and also is one of the most
important parts of summer life here in the high desert of Arizona. Beyond the
pool you can see a little pond back there. That is our oxidation pond, our
black water system, where we treat our waste with two different kinds of
bacteria, one aerobic and one anaerobic, and then beyond the pond and the trees
down there you can see a series of structures. When the original work
shoppers came to build the site here in the 70's they needed a place to set up a
living area and they didn't want to do it up here on the side of a Mesa where
they were setting off dynamite on a regular basis so they went down there
right next to the Agua Fria River and they set up what was originally referred
to as the 'Plywood City'. Slowly the plywood structures were replaced by more
durable concrete cubes 8 foot by 8 foot which are still used as
residential spaces today. I live down there
and I love it. We have the majority of our green houses down there so this is
actually one of the archival designs designed for an arcology in a very, very
cold climate. I believe it's designed for somewhere in Siberia and it's an example
of the concept of an energy apron which is this entire hillside of a greenhouse
and it's tiered so the tiers on the lowest end of the greenhouse would have
a much cooler climate than the top tiers which would allow you a much more
diverse range of agriculture that you could build and it also would allow for
the heat rising in the greenhouse to be used as a way to heat the structures
where you would have the commercial and residential recreational spaces. In 1970
there was just this open Mesa and an idea. Our focus here has been to
demonstrate what can happen when a group of people get together surrounding an
idea and try to make it happen. I guess the real advice is to figure out
how to be really neighborly with your neighbors. That's really the next step
for all of us really to figure out how to be better neighbors to each other.
We've lost a sense of community that in fact even in America we once did have
and so the work is to regain that sense of community. The spatial awareness of
how that can work in a neighborhood is probably the first step so
go at it brothers and sisters, really.
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get out there and go do something that makes your life better. Peace.