Why he matters
Frank Lloyd Wright made Scottsdale a name in architecture. Paolo Soleri made it an argument. He came to the desert as one of Wright’s apprentices, left after a year and a half, and spent the next sixty years building his own answer a few miles away: half-buried shells of concrete cast over piles of dirt, turned south so the winter sun comes in and the summer sun stays out.
He paid for it with bells. The bronze and ceramic windbells cast at Cosanti funded the buildings, the apprentices and eventually Arcosanti, the experimental town he founded seventy miles north in 1970. They are still poured by hand, and they are still the most honest souvenir the Scottsdale area sells.
Where to find his mark today
Cosanti. His home, studio and foundry on Doubletree Ranch Road, just over the Paradise Valley line, now an Arizona Historic Site. Free to walk, with bronze pours on weekday mornings.
Soleri Bridge and Plaza. The pedestrian bridge over the Arizona Canal at the Scottsdale Waterfront, dedicated on December 11, 2010. The two 64-foot pylons are a solar calendar, and it is the only one of his bridges ever built.
The bells. A bronze bell assembly he made in 1969 hangs at the bridge plaza, and new bells hang in the Cosanti gallery.
Seeing it for yourself
Do Cosanti first and the bridge second. At Cosanti, walk down the steps into the shaded apses, where the air is ten degrees cooler with no machinery involved, and time your visit for a weekday morning pour. Then head to the Scottsdale Waterfront and walk onto the bridge at solar noon. In December the shaft of light between the pylons falls long across the red stripe in the deck; in June it disappears.
If you have time for a third stop, go to Taliesin West, where he started. Seeing the master’s desert camp and the apprentice’s earth-cast answer on the same day is the best architecture lesson in the Valley. In November the bridge plaza is the stage for Canal Convergence.
The full story
Paolo Soleri was born in Turin in 1919 and earned a doctorate in architecture before he came to Arizona. In 1947 he arrived at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship as an apprentice and stayed about a year and a half, long enough to absorb the desert and to start arguing with what he was taught. He also started designing bridges, a habit he kept for the rest of his life without, for decades, getting one built. For the teacher’s side of the story, see Frank Lloyd Wright.
In 1956 he and his wife Colly settled on a few acres of Paradise Valley desert and named the place Cosanti. There he tested earth-casting at full scale: shape a mound of soil and silt into the form of the room you want, pour concrete over it, wait, then dig the dirt out from underneath. Windbells, first ceramic and then bronze, cast on site and sold to visitors, paid for everything. In 1970 the bell money helped him found Arcosanti near Cordes Junction, a prototype for what he called arcology, dense vertical cities that leave the surrounding desert alone.
Scottsdale came calling late. By the Cosanti account, the city’s public art program first approached him about a bridge in 1990; the commission came together in the mid-2000s, when the Waterfront rose along the Arizona Canal and Scottsdale Public Art asked the 86-year-old architect to span it. The ten earth-cast concrete panels in the plaza, about 3,500 pounds each, were made at Cosanti. The Soleri Bridge and Plaza was dedicated on December 11, 2010, ten days before the solstice, so the crowd could watch the pylons’ light do what he said it would. He was 91.
Soleri died in April 2013 at 93. The Cosanti Foundation kept the compound and the foundry running, and in 2020 the architecture school Wright had founded moved its students to Cosanti and Arcosanti after leaving Taliesin West, the master’s school taking shelter at the apprentice’s campus. His Scottsdale years span the boomtown era through the 2010s.