The Sustainable City of the Desert of Arizona
Jeff Stein is a co-president of the Cosanti Foundation. Arcosanti is meant to be a demonstration project of the idea of arcology, architecture and ecology as two parts of a single entity, and the way thinking of it as such can help us build more sustainable cities for the world’s growing population. In the 1960's Paolo Soleri had a kind of an "aha" moment about cities. First of all, they're sort of the container for human social evolution, and second of all, if they're only a few stories thick spreading out for hundreds of square miles, as Phoenix does 900 square miles of pretty much single-story houses, it isn't going to be very sustainable.
In most American cities 50 to 60 percent of the landmass is covered by roads, streets, parking lots and alleys, things that they hope will connect us through our use of machines, but in reality separate us in space. Our idea here at Arcosanti is to demonstrate how a town could be organized three dimensionally. Compact, complex, not spreading out for hundreds of acres or even hundreds of square miles, but contained so that they might figure out how 8 billion of us humans are going to share the planet, and how we're going to share it with the hundreds of millions of other species with whom we've co-evolved. Arcosanti is trying to demonstrate another way of inhabiting the planet.
Arcosanti is an urban laboratory in the high desert of Arizona about 60 miles north of Phoenix. One floor up from the entrance is a visitor center where they sell bells that are made on site, the main export of this community. One floor below is the cafe at Arcosanti, where they offer three meals a day open to the public. A lot of the architecture at Arcosanti is focused on the idea of mixed-use space so the “Craft 3” building has the commercial bell production sales and the visitor center at the very top. The cafe is the second craft and then at the very bottom of this building in the last two stories they have residential spaces, so the building has a use 24 hours a day.
They have a couple of different kinds of living spaces that you can get into when you become a resident here at Arcosanti. Something that's very common is a co-housing unit. A co-housing unit will have four or five different bedrooms to one or two different living room spaces, a kitchen and a bathroom shared by all of the people that live in that space. They own eight hundred and sixty acres which they’ve built this reimagined city on. They also lease an additional 3,200 acres from the state of Arizona bringing our total preserve to about four thousand acres.
They have a bronze foundry at Arcosanti, as well as at their sister location in Scottsdale, Arizona, Cosanti. These are used for the bell making process. The bronze foundry is inside of the apse structure, which has studio spaces on the first floor and then on the second floor there are windows into the residential spaces built behind and above the workspaces. Having the living space incorporated into the same structure as the furnace that they use to heat the bronze allows them to utilize the waste heat produced by the furnace as heating in the winter for the living space.
In the Kali Soleri gardens, Arcosanti has it’s communal lawn space which is shared by everyone on site. This idea of using shared spaces allows for the community to have a much smaller footprint than a conventional community where most families would have their own lawn. This community garden is maintained with greywater that comes from the sinks and showers on site.
The entire site is south-facing and incorporates giant concrete arches over outdoor areas to take advantage of the direction of the Sun throughout the year. Most of the structures are made out of concrete so as the Sun passes very low in the southern sky in the winter heating the concrete and heating the space as much as 15 degrees alternatively that when the Sun passes very high in the sky in the summertime the arches and the apse structures are able to cast shade over the work areas beneath making it a more habitable space throughout the year. They even have lines marked out on floors that show where the least and most sun is accessible throughout the year.
Their focus has been to demonstrate what can happen when a group of people get together surrounding an idea and try to make it happen. Jeff’s advice is to figure out how to be really neighborly with your neighbors. That's really the next step for all of us really to figure out how to be better neighbors to each other. We've lost a sense of community that we once had and so the work is to regain that sense of community. The spatial awareness of how that can work in a neighborhood is probably the first step.
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