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Somewhere near Cordes Junction, Arizona
I could write a long book about time and space
If you take the I-17 North out of Phoenix for about an hour, racing on a busy two lane highway ten or fifteen miles above the posted 75 mph speed limit, up and over hills that could best be described as mountains, you will soon arrive at Cordes Junction- an exit with a gas station, a truck stop and a muddy, unmaintained and almost impassable dirt road that will take you to a few more miles to Arcosanti, architect Paolo Soleri's unfinished (and unrealistic) dream.
Green Architecture may suddenly be popular, still Arcosanti is not. Construction and design continues, our earnest tour guide told our four person tour group that the complex (started in the 1970s) was already four percent complete, with the other ninety six percent scheduled to finish up sometime around 2970.
What is Arcosanti? Well, according to the tour guide it is a living example of Paolo Soleri's ideas of arcology, an invented mix of architecture and ecology. It is supposed to be an ideal, green city, possibly self sufficient, housing 5,000 people efficiently in the middle of nowhere on a ridge subject to daily temperature swings of 50 degrees. Construction is slowly proceeding all of the time, people live there year round and either build very slowly, work on artwork or produce Soleri Bells, wind chimes that are available in finer stores throughout the southwest.
Soleri himself is still alive, although I can't imagine that lasting too much longer. He still spends two nights a week at Arcosanti, blindly continuing to design new ideas that people forty generations from now will still not live to see completed.
"Arcosanti 5000" is the name of this model, one that should probably be better preserved if it is expected to make it intact to the grand opening in 900 years or so. The completed building on the right is visible in the model if you know just where to look (I helpfully shaded it red in Photoshop for you), a small lost apse in the middle of all of those hulking apses.
Just because it is interesting, it does not mean that Arcosanti is good. Maybe its the long construction schedule, maybe its the shoddy construction by students, maybe Soleri has a wide angle vision but not an immediate, focused one. What is there feels indistinctive- almost like a third rate Dhaka, run down not by time but by lack of inspiration.
Arcosanti attracts all sorts of creative types, people who might normally give up on that killer, low pressure job at an unpopular coffee shop to chase an unrealistic, less responsible dream in the desert. In reality it would be a great place to hide out if you ever ran into some type of trouble that made you seek refuge from all those dark forces surrounding you. There is no television or radio, hardly anyone ever visits, and the people working there don't seem to care about your past or, well, anything actually. I'm fairly certain that Osama bin Laden himself could be out back planning all sorts of (presumably) evil plans and get away with it, as long as he wears a plaid shirt, keeps to himself and helps wash dishes in the communal kitchen once and a while.
Frank Lloyd Wright remains the single most well known American architect and is still Scottsdale's most famous (dead) resident. Well over sixty years ago, a still alive Wright decided to abandon the cold, Wisconsin winters of Spring Green for the mountains just northeast of town. He brought with him a pack of inexperienced students who helped him design, build and haunt housing and offices built from predominately found local materials by inexperienced students. Not the greatest building(s) in the world, but they're alright. Today it is still the home of whatever is left of Taliesin Architects, as well as (up until 1985) Wright's most recent widow.
There are two tours at Taliesin West, I chose the more involved 90 minute tour that promised more details and more stops, but all of that was overshadowed by its guide. For while it is true that everyone (now) loves Frank Lloyd Wright, it is also true that no one loves Frank Lloyd Wright more than my tour guide. To him, Frank Lloyd Wright (or "Fran-loy-ite" as he began to say after a while) was infallible, he apparently single handedly invented such breakthroughs as air conditioning, elevators, office buildings, indirect lighting and translucent glass, he valiantly battled the evils of foreigners Mies and Corbusier, and would have created an absolutely perfect American utopia if anyone had just bothered to listen to him (the sad reality is that Wright's Broadacre City was more symptomatic of car driven nightmarish sprawl than any type of imaginable utopia, but I guess that's just my opinion). The hero worship actually took away from the tour, from spaces that were better than Wisconsin but certainly not his best.
(A possibly interesting side note. One of Wright's students at Taliesin West was Paolo Soleri, the guy who keeps redesigning Arcosanti as if it might really get finished one day. The Arcosanti tour said that Soleri and Wright had some type of nasty falling out, while the Taliesin West tour failed to mention Soleri at all- although it did go out of the way to say that Anthony Quinn was a student until Frank Lloyd Wright told him to become an actor. I can't remember if it was before or after Wright invented toast, cured cancer and perfected cold fusion, it's all a blur now).
