What it means
Cosanti is two things at once in the Valley. It is a place: the earth-cast studio, home and foundry that Paolo Soleri and his wife Colly began on Doubletree Ranch Road in 1956. And it is an object: the bronze and ceramic windbells cast there, which hang from patio beams and front-door ramadas all over metro Phoenix. “We got them a Cosanti” is a complete housewarming sentence.
The place looks like nothing from the road, a hedge and a gravel lot. Behind it are half-sunken rooms, concrete shells and quarter-sphere apses turned south so the winter sun reaches in and the summer sun does not. Soleri built them by earth-casting: shape a mound of soil, pour concrete over it, let it cure, dig the soil out. You can still see the grain of the dirt in the ceilings.
The Cosanti park guide covers the visit in detail, and the Paolo Soleri profile covers the man. This page is about the name and why locals use it.
Where you’ll meet it
On housewarming lists, in the Cosanti gallery itself, on the architecture guide, in directions to the Paradise Valley side of Doubletree Ranch Road, and inside the word Arcosanti, which Soleri built from it.
Where the word came from
Soleri, born in Turin and trained as an architect, came to Taliesin West in 1947 as an apprentice in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fellowship. He stayed about a year and a half, parted ways with Wright, spent time back in Italy, and returned to Arizona. In 1956 he and Colly settled on about five acres of desert in what is now the Town of Paradise Valley and named the place themselves.
The name is Italian, and it is a manifesto. Cosa means thing; anti is where the readings split. The Cosanti Foundation, which Paolo and Colly established in 1965, explains it as “against things,” a rejection of hyper-consumerism and an argument for living more fully with less. Other accounts read anti in its older Italian sense of “before,” which gives the softer gloss quoted for decades: there are things more important than objects. Both readings land in the same place.
The irony is the part locals enjoy. Soleri spent the next half century making things, beautiful ones, by the thousand, because the bells paid for the buildings, for the apprentices, and from 1970 for Arcosanti, the town he named by joining Cosanti to his other coinage, arcology.
What it is not
Cosanti is not in Scottsdale, despite how often Scottsdale guides claim it; it sits just west of the city line in Paradise Valley. It is not Arcosanti, the experimental town 70 miles north. And it is not a museum piece: it is still a working foundry with a gallery, run by the foundation.
The fine print
Status. The foundation credits the structures built in the late 1950s and early 1960s with earning Cosanti a place on the Arizona register of historic places. The original building, the Earth House, served later as a student dormitory; studios, a performance space, a pool and the gallery fill out the site.
Visiting. Cosanti’s gallery is open Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Guided tours run Monday through Friday at 9:15 a.m., and the bronze pours happen on weekdays only. Wandering on your own is welcome.
The bridge. Soleri designed bridges all his life and saw one built: the Soleri Bridge and Plaza over the Arizona Canal at the Waterfront, dedicated on December 11, 2010, when he was 91. It is the best place to see his work without leaving Old Town.
The neighbors. Cosanti is one of two handmade artist compounds in this part of the Valley; the other is the Cattle Track Arts Compound, ten minutes south. Soleri died in April 2013, at 93, and the foundation still runs the studio and pours the bells.