What it means
Arcosanti is a cluster of concrete vaults, apses and round windows on a mesa edge above the Agua Fria River, about 70 miles north of Phoenix, and it is the most famous building project in Arizona that was never finished. Paolo Soleri, the Italian architect who came to the desert as a Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice, began it in 1970 as a prototype city. The plan called for thousands of residents in one compact, walkable structure. What stands is a fragment, home to a few dozen people at a time.
Arcology is the idea behind it, and the word is Soleri’s own: architecture plus ecology. An arcology stacks a city into a single dense structure so that nobody needs a car and the desert around it stays desert.
In Scottsdale you will hear Arcosanti as a day-trip suggestion and as the reason the bells exist. Soleri’s Cosanti studio in Paradise Valley cast and sold windbells for decades, and the bells paid for the city. The man’s full story is on the Paolo Soleri page.
Where you’ll meet it
On the drive to Sedona, on the day trips list, in the bell gallery at Cosanti, in the architecture guide, and, if you played SimCity 2000, on your monitor.
Where the word came from
Soleri coined arcology in 1969 as a portmanteau of architecture and ecology, and laid out the idea that year in a large book of drawings subtitled The City in the Image of Man. His argument was a direct reply to the suburb: low-density sprawl wastes land, energy and time, so build up and in instead of out. That put him on the opposite side from his old teacher. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City spread families across the countryside an acre at a time; Soleri wanted thousands under one roof.
The place name followed the word. Arcosanti joins arcology to Cosanti, the name Soleri had given his Paradise Valley studio, itself built from the Italian cosa (thing) and anti. He broke ground in 1970 on land in Yavapai County at about 3,700 feet, near Cordes Junction. The first plan was for 1,500 residents, revised by the mid-1970s to 5,000.
Construction ran on volunteers and workshop students who paid to learn by building, and on money from bronze and ceramic bells cast on site. The most recent building was completed in 1989.
The word escaped. Arcologies became a fixture of science fiction, appearing in William Gibson’s 1984 Neuromancer as corporate tower-cities, and SimCity 2000 let players build them to save on roads. Few people who know the word from a game know it was invented for a mesa off I-17.
What it is not
Arcosanti is not Cosanti. Cosanti is the studio and foundry on Doubletree Ranch Road, twenty minutes from Old Town. Arcosanti is the town an hour and more north. Nor is it a commune or a ruin; it is a working, if much-reduced, foundation property with a gallery and tours.
The fine print
The numbers. The built town occupies about 25 acres inside a preserve of roughly 4,060 acres. Its population has tended to run between 50 and 150, many of them students and volunteers. In its active years it drew tens of thousands of visitors a year; the National Trust describes thousands still arriving annually.
The money. Bells remain the signature product and the historic engine of the place, alongside tour fees and donations. The same casting method, earth or sand molds and molten bronze, links the bells to the buildings.
The recognition. Soleri received a National Design Award for lifetime achievement in 2006, directed the master plan until his death in April 2013 at 93, and saw one public work built in Scottsdale: the Soleri Bridge and Plaza, dedicated on December 11, 2010.
The open question. The Cosanti Foundation, which owns both sites, has cut back its programs in recent years, and visiting schedules change. Call or check online before driving north. Whether Arcosanti grows, holds or becomes a monument is unresolved, which is fitting for a city that was always more argument than address.