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PAOLO SOLERI
 
 
 
 
  Name   Paolo Soleri 
       
  Born   June 21, 1919
       
  Died   April 9, 2013
       
  Nationality   Italy
       
  School    
       
  Official website   arcosanti.org
     
 
BIOGRAPHY
 

Paolo Soleri was born in 1919 in Turin, Italy, where he studied at the Polytechnic, receiving a doctorate in architecture in 1946. From 1947 to 1948, he attended Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous architecture studio. After practicing in southern Italy and Turin in the early 1950s, he emigrated with his wife, Carolyn Woods, to the United States and settled in Arizona. Soleri devoted his life to the research of alternative urban development. His chief interest was in cities as a framework in which to combine human and natural resources and diversity of functions and events. This study moved him to explore a new concept, arcologies, environments that fused architecture and ecology.

His concern for the relationship between human-made objects and the earth is expressed in his early Dome house (1949) designed for Leonora Woods, his future mother-in-law. Located on a hillside at Cave Creek, Arizona, the house had retaining walls that were cast with red boulders and concrete, following Wright’s technique. Soleri also explored thermal inertia resulting from a glazed dome above the living room and the excavated areas underground. The dome can be shaded or opened according to the seasons.

In 1951, Soleri moved with his wife to southern Italy and began his explorations in ceramics. His first major building, a workshop for Ceramica Artistica Solimene (1953) in Vietri-sulmare, faces the Mediterranean on the Amalfi coast. It was built on reinforced concrete covered outside with pottery. Here, Soleri anticipates later explorations using materials from the area and relating engineering, site, and handicraft.

After returning to the United States in 1955, Soleri began his project for Cosanti (from the Latin “before things”) on a five-acre site in Scottsdale, Arizona. The complex grew according to the needs of the community and the experience gained in construction techniques. Soleri explored here the technique of wash-away silt casting, using it in construction of cast-concrete architectural buildings, wind-bells, sculptures, and models. Cosanti consists of several units related with the site in an organic language of architectural form. The first structure was the Earth House (1956), inmersed in the site after the land was excavated. The ceramic studio (1956) consisted of a structure of ribbed reinforced concrete. Other spaces are the Cosanti Gallery, with a vault formed in a mound; a series of working spaces with solar devices, the piscine and canopy; and the foundation offices (1971). As a comprehensive site, Cosanti provided an array of architectural prototypes. This was Soleri’s first experience relating craft, work, ecology, and life in one complex.

Soleri’s chief aim was to keep the integrity of both the natural and the urban. He needed a large-scale laboratory to research and develop his model for how to inhabit cities in the future. To demonstrate how to improve urban conditions and to minimize the impact of destructive forces of suburbia on the environment, Soleri started Arcosanti in 1971. Still in the process of construction, Arcosanti is located in Cordon Junction, 70 miles north of Phoenix in the mesa country. Soleri defines Arcosanti as an urban laboratory, an instrument for research meant to accommodate up to 7,000 people. Mostly pedestrian oriented, this prototype arcology project will eventually rise up to 25 stories, covering only 13 acres and leaving open 860 acres.

Arcosanti is composed of a series of public and semipublic areas, private zones, and utilities, most of which rely on passive energy. The East Crescend Complex is considered the essence of arcology, combining living and working spaces. These include the Colly Soleri Music Center (1989), a semipublic area dedicated to studios and diverse types of private housing. Arcosanti also has two greenhouses, gardens, a small vineyard, a field, and an orchard.

Over the last three decades, Arcosanti has been built by thousands of volunteers, all sharing part of Soleri’s approach and visionary ideas about the environment. In this setting, workers share a communal way of life based on production of craft, agriculture, and a healthy use and inhabitation of the land. Soleri calls this approach the ethic of the urban and speaks of the culture of the automobile as the instrument of isolation and segmentation. In his view, our cities will require planners not only to change cities physically but also to change the habits and principles of human interaction. Presently, about 70 individuals live and work in Arcosanti. The community hosts a music festival, exhibits, lectures, and seminars. Arcosanti remains, essentially, a laboratory for multiuse architecture based on pedestrian circulation, energy efficiency, and careful solar orientation.

One of Soleri’s recurrent themes has been the notion of bridge cities, which were published by the Museum of Modern Art in The Architecture of Bridges (1948). A large exhibition of his drawings of bridges and ideas about arcology held at the Corcoran Gallery of Washington in 1970 introduced the public to his notion of miniaturization, concentration, and ecological balance. Soleri has written several books and lectures all over the world.

Although Arcosanti concentrated most of Soleri’s energies and efforts, he also designed the University of Arizona Cancer Center Chapel (1986) in Tucson. The interior of the chapel, stylized as a tree, has a multitude of metal wind-bells cascading from the ceiling. He also designed the De Concini residence (1982) in Phoenix and produced urban studies for the development of Scottsdale (1992).

Soleri’s experiences in Cosanti and Arcosanti inspired him to develop a meaningful and alternative urban theory. His notion of “evolutionary coherence” in the city argues that urban megastructures share some characteristics with the complex systems of nature. Soleri is critical of the explosive growth of some metropolitan areas, such as Phoenix and Los Angeles. His planning thesis is based on concentration and miniaturization. Soleri has been defined as a visionary architect, urban planner, and process philosopher, and his work and books have advanced a new spirituality of technology, science, habitat, and humankind. His life has been devoted to experimentation in urban planning, architecture, and the applied arts. His idealism and research on the relationship between inhabitation, life, and work constitute his fundamental contribution.

JOSE BERNARDI

 
 
 
 
 
TIMELINE
 

21 June 1919 Born in Turin, Italy;

1941–46 Studied at Turin Polytechnic ;

1946 degree in architecture, Turin Polytechnic;

1947–48 fellow, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Taliesin West, Arizona and Taliesin East, Wisconsin ;

1950–55 In private practice, Turin and Southern Italy ;

1955 emigrated to the United States ;

from 1956 president, Cosanti Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizona;

1962 Distinguished visiting lecturer, Arizona State University College of Architecture, Tempe. Graham Foundation Fellowship ;

1964 and 1967 Guggenheim grant ;

1989 organized the Minds for History series of dialogues and lectures, Arcosanti, Arizona ;

9 April 2013 Died in Paradise Valley, Arizona, USA.

 
 
 
 
 
FURTHER READING
 

Burkhart, François, “Thirty-Five Years After: A Visit to Cosanti,” Domus 812 (February 1999) Cook, Jeffrey, “Paolo Soleri,” Central Arizona Chapter of American Institute of Architects, A Guide to the Architecture of Metro Phoenix, Phoenix, Arizona: Phoenix Publishing, 1983 Mayne, David S. and Debra Giannini (producers), Soleri’s Cities: Architecture for Planet Earth and Beyond (videorecording), Chicago: Home Vision, 1993 “Soleri’s Arizona,” Domus 812 (February 1999) Wall, Donald, Documenta: The Paolo Soleri Retrospective, Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1970

Selected Publications

Arcology: The City in the Image of Man, 1969 The Sketchbooks of Paolo Soleri, 1971 The Bridge between Matter and Spirit Is Matter Becoming Spirit: The Arcology of Paolo Soleri, 1973 Arcosanti: An Urban Laboratory? 1983 Paolo Soleri’s Earth Casting: For Sculpture, Models, and Construction (with Scott M. Davis), 1984 Technology and Cosmogenesis, 1985

 
 
 
 
 
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