Dreams Endure Amid Discouragement in Arizona Community

Nestled in rolling hills dotted with prickly pear and other desert brush, architect Paolo Soleri’s vision of the future provides a slice of heaven for some who dwell in his experimental Arcosanti.

They live like bees in a concrete hive growing slowly but steadily on basalt cliffs that have been terraced to hold their eventual source of food and heat: greenhouses.

But 27 years after work began on the prototype “arcology”--a blending of architecture and ecology--Arcosanti is just 4% to 5% complete, and there’s no sign that construction will proceed at anything but a snail’s pace.

“The slow pace has been frustrating,” said Soleri, 78, who splits his time between Arcosanti and a home in Scottsdale. “When we started we thought we would attract people who would fund us. We are not.”

Soleri said potential sponsors scoff at his idea of an Earth-friendly city where people live frugally, making the most of their resources.

“We are proposing a number of things that aren’t accepted in the current mind-set, which is happiness and the pursuit of it through individual and social consumption,” he said.

The result of the funding shortage is an experiment that barely resembles Soleri’s vision, say some of Arcosanti’s 70 full-time residents.

Instead of a car-free city that relies mostly on the sun for energy, Arcosanti residents need to drive to get mail and groceries, and get electricity through a power grid like any other community.

“We are so far from completion --you couldn’t possibly live here without a car,” said Shirlee Wheeler, 74, a retired nine-year resident of Arcosanti.

Wheeler, Soleri and other Arcosanti inhabitants say the project needs more residents--at least 500--to sustain a self-reliant community that can grow its own food and have a store for basic necessities.

Soleri said such a size is also needed for his projected city where people live like an extended family, yet retain their individuality and some degree of anonymity.

“There should be at least 500 people. In that sense I’m discouraged,” said David Tollas, Arcosanti’s construction manager and an 11-year resident. “This is like living on a ranch.”

Tollas, 38, said Soleri’s strictness has partially kept the population from burgeoning, but he said Soleri has been more open in recent years.

Despite the project’s sluggish pace, Tollas and Wheeler said they stay at Arcosanti because they’re convinced Soleri’s vision will eventually bear fruit.

“I think you have to be idealistic to be here. You have to believe in something better,” said Tollas, who met his wife at Arcosanti and is now rearing a 5-month-old son. “That’s what it takes to stay here --working on this ideal thing. It’s a constant struggle.”

Wheeler also met her husband at Arcosanti, and together they share a 330-square-foot apartment with a tiny kitchen and living room/bedroom--considered luxurious at Arcosanti.

“My personality has always been a bleeding-heart liberal do-gooder: Save the planet and all the people,” Wheeler said. “As soon as I saw it [Arcosanti], I said, ‘Here is the answer.’ It was absolutely beautiful.”

Arcosanti has survived the last quarter-century on visitor donations, tuition from workshops offered at the site and from the sales of the famous Soleri wind bells.

Royalties from the bronze and ceramic bells, which go for anywhere from $12 to $30,000, bring in about a third of the Cosanti Foundation’s $900,000 annual budget, said spokeswoman Lori Carroll.

The bells are made in workshops situated in outdoor concrete apses that give Arcosanti its futuristic look. The apses face south to take advantage of sunlight, structurally acting as heat sinks in the winter and providing cool shade in the summer.

In keeping with Soleri’s principle of multiuse buildings, one apse doubles as an amphitheater and the other has several living quarters built behind it, their circular windows looking out over the interior of the apse.

If ever completed, Arcosanti would rise 25 stories and house about 7,000 people over 15 acres. Soleri said he created the word Arcosanti as a combination of ‘arcology’ and ‘cosanti,’ the Italian word for “before or against matter [material things].”

Soleri is avid when talking about his ideals for a city devoid of materialism and hyper-consumerism.

“Pure capitalism is pure Darwinism,” he said. “I’d really like to make the city a living room where people decide to act and live together and develop ideas together.”

Arcosanti already offers a number of forums for intellectual exchange: concerts, construction workshops and a discussion series that has included scientific essayist Stephen Jay Gould and composer John Cage.

Soleri said he hopes to attract more interest in the project through Arcosanti’s Web site: www.arcosanti.org.

It’s a hope shared by residents like Wheeler, who chose Arcosanti after spending most of her life frequenting a health club, the theater and symphony in downtown Chicago.

“It was a great life but it was missing this component of being connected to a larger purpose of more than just myself and my life,” she said. “Here, we don’t lock our doors and we don’t worry about crime. And I feel loved.”