Cities from Scratch

Paolo Soleri would have been 100 years old today. He was born, appropriately, on the solstice in 1919 in Turin, Italy. He died at 93, probably still speaking in the future tense as he had his entire professional life, never giving up on the brave new world he was going to make. 

He was 87, lean and weathered, when I met him at Arcosanti to look through the archives for drawings and models for an exhibition that didn’t happen—hasn’t yet happened. I had interviewed him earlier, when he came to Washington to receive the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for lifetime achievement. As I remember it, Laura Bush would be giving him the award but Paolo was so angry and disgusted by the Bush administration that when she handed it to him he was going to hand her a several-pages long diatribe on the wreckage her husband had made of the country. How does one respond to a desert prophet with such a plan? One can picture Laura Bush’s frozen smile, as she looked into his piercing ungrateful eyes. If only he were still with us…

It takes a certain ferocity to decide to build a new world in the desert outside of Phoenix, and Soleri was uncompromising. Soleri’s cities, his “arcologies” are radical reorganizations of space and society, because you can’t really have one without the other. When architects and urban designers talk about “form” and “order” they are referring to physical elements and spatial arrangements. The very same terms, though, have currency in political discourse, in what James Scott calls “statecraft,” and it is in the deployment of such terms that the city, as both a physical place and a political entity, comes into being.

I’ve been thinking a lot about making cities from scratch as I read Scott’s book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, chase the ghost of Francis Nicholson--serial royal governor and purported city-shaper of Williamsburg and Annapolis—and reflect on Soleri’s efforts. It’s easy to dismiss Arcosanti as so much windmill tilting, itself a metaphor with a renewable energy twist, and to dismiss the idea that novel architectural forms like cast concrete apses would be sufficient to effect the revolution. It’s also easy to forget how long city-making takes and how rare are the true cities from scratch. Yet, the irascible Nicholson sketched the outlines of new royal capital cities as part of his job to keep the colonists in line. The bones of those two cities were sufficiently compelling that they ended up embedded in the plan for Washington, a city most definitely not designed for obedient colonists.