mm hmm.
When I'm asked why you're doing this, I'm saying that the reasons of
population control, the ability to serve more population, the reasons of
waste of land, the reason of waste in general, reason of pollutions and so
on are only tangential reasons. You know what? I don't advocate this
because they are going to solve those problems that they would solve those
problems. I'm advocating this because I believe that the the urban man is
the man of the future. The natural man of today is not the cave dweller or
the or the or the country man or the cowboy or the farmer, the city
dweller. If it is the city dweller, we better prepare that kind of device
that that kind of topography that is going to serve the city dweller,
paolo Soleri italian born architect who now makes Arizona his home. The
topography he proposes. He calls our ecology architecture plus ecology.
Cities that are built up, not out that are dense, not sprawling, That are
three dimensional all man city based needs and tools in close proximity
and harmony. 20 minutes to go anywhere without cars and all around the
city. The variety and immensity of nature. But for Solari, the archaeology
is not just a better plumbing. It is the expression of what he sees as a
basic law of life, living entities becoming steadily more complex and
dance more life activity in less time and space. By this rule man is
evolving the super organism society. Archaeology is a phase in the
development of this organisms new environment in the process of studying
your work. Mr salary, I've noticed two important concepts that of
miniaturization and complex ification. Would you elaborate on these,
please?
I think that if I ever somehow I'm feeling that I am doing something very
important is because I believe in those two points. Which means that I see
that life has been small developing not myself. I mean this has been
established by other people more interested than I am, that life moves
from the simple to the complex and once this is accepted, then we see that
this motion is automatically also a motion from the scattered from the
scattered to the gathered. Which means life is really an implosive process
is not an explosive process. And the specific characteristic of man is
that he is is the creature that is going to be able to through this
implosion too, in a way explode mentally. Which means that he's going to
become greater in its creative power just because it has been able to
somehow become so greatly imploded instrumentally. And this is why I think
the city, which is one of the greatest instruments we ever invented life
ever invented. It has to be this implosive kind of phenomena so that the
individuals and the society are going to be able to really literally
mentally
reach beyond any physical obstacle and beyond any physical boundaries just
because of this fantastic discipline that we were able to put to our
instruments, our instrumentalities. The city included. I agree with you
strongly about miniaturization and our our techniques are so clumsy when
we start anything new. I mean, the radio sets in the beginning of this
century there great vacuum tubes, you could warm your hands by and now
we're down to these well, the works or radio set today, you can't see with
the naked eyes, only the loudspeaker that's still visible. And maybe one
day I'll miniaturize that out of sight.
Where life has miniaturized other sites so many things. Our brain is a is
a fantastic machine, which by the way, should we miniaturize men Many
years ago, somebody wrote a science fiction story called minimum man
suggesting one of the problems, one of the ways of solving our problems of
overcrowding problems to make men about this big. You see, Oh, I'm I'm I'm
advocating that maybe not that big, but certainly it's a little smaller
than what we are now because our brains because but we don't have to, I
guess, well, would be rather disproportionate if we if our heads remain
the same size or but instead of being 6.5 ft or seven that we are becoming.
Now, let's let's stay in five or four and
think of the advantages. I mean, we we explored the size of the earth. We
solve many of the logistical problems, the problem of space, of the
structure of weight and we are complicating our lives by becoming bigger.
Remember the dinosaurs? It's really a biological explosion in two ways
we're exploring by number that we're exploring by by size.
It is not surprising that salary a thoroughly modern man whose vision
represents an advanced edge of futuristic urban planning is himself a
strikingly down to earth person who prefers a simple, even spartan life.
He believes in the city, but he works in the desert When he first came to
America in 1946. It was to this landscape to study under frank Lloyd
wright, who he says was anti city, an american pioneer type, who can't
accept the discipline that urban man has to accept. This discipline is
based on what salary calls congruence. Harmony of man with nature on the
broadest scale, ignorance of the rule of congruence leads to short term
opulence in a despoiled world acceptance of congruence is acceptance of
nature's longer timescale. Congruence Presupposes that man might have to
give up some things that less material things will confirm more living
values for man. Well, I think that many things are commodities to us now
are demonstrating themselves as not ecologically feasible and acceptable.
So we have to find a congruence between ourselves and nature. And then
within this congruence we can we can start to develop our beneficial
environment. So it might be that opulence as to go because opulence, it's
in a way anti life opulence is a state, it's not in a way a process of
becoming. So we have to move from from a state which is a dead end
to a much more dynamic and in a way through condition we're in life can
start to move again. The Arizona landscape probably had something to do
with how I developed my ideas because it's a very striking, wholesome
landscape. And it suggested if man is going to become anything, he has to
deal somehow boldly with with nature which is facing him and nature is is
that machine that has allowed us to become too to be invented? Let's say
at the same time, it's a it's a crushing machine and we have to be very
careful in how we go about it. The desert is a very funny quality. It's a
very strong environment. At the same time, you can destroy it with very
little you put a little house in the middle of the desert and the desert
is gone. It's it's a very strange. We are advocating the city and then we
are getting people into the wilderness saying, well, we have to start from
zero and you don't have anything. You don't know what you're seeking. You
have to build it. So you're coming and you don't find a society. You don't
find a noble environment. You find that the wilderness. So you have to be
pioneers and work for something which is not there yet, which is something
is going to be there. If you put your two cents in
of the 30 archaeology. Solari has designed one. Arcosanti is presently
under construction in the central part of my own home state. Arizona
Arcosanti intended as the headquarters for the Cassani Foundation. It's a
larry school and workshop Is planned to cover 10 acres, rise to a height
of 20 stories and house 2500 people. Normal procedure today for building
in the southwest is to spread out at ground level land is cheaper than
high rise construction and besides people want separate dwellings. This is
phoenix Arizona expanding inexorably a car is a necessity here. Everything
is miles from everything else in such a desert city. Only the people on
the outside periphery actually live in the desert and they too will soon
be swallowed up. By contrast at Arcosanti, all the residents will be
minutes by foot from the elements of their urban life and all will face
nature and be only a few minutes walk from its spacious statements by his
own standards, Soleri's Arcosanti is a very small archaeology, but he does
what he can with what he had
to to project too far into the future. As took it as you know, as as just
living in the past. So I think the future has to be connected directly
with our performance and a feasibility at the same time. I feel that if we
demand from technology strongly enough some answers, technology is going
to give it to us. My dilemma now is that I I really want to want to check
more the wise than the house. So we are building. We are trying to build
now one of those small example of this thing and I keep telling my my
apprentice and my participant in this thing, that they shouldn't be so
much worried about how we're going to go about this, but to be convinced
about the why we are doing it and then do our best to to implement this
thing one way or the other, once we can demonstrate something, demonstrate
to ourselves and to to other people that there is something very, very
basic developed into this. Then we could ask industry technology to come
in and really give sound and answer invisibility in cost, in in effective
efficiency and so on. Why's not house. So Larry is trying to come to grips
with whole systems and ultimately, this is what our civilization must do
when I was Secretary of the Interior. And now on my own work as an
environmental consultant, this idea of whole systems has impressed me as
absolutely essential to the preservation of man and nature. The great
naturalist, john muir put it simply, everything is hitched together.
Problem solving can be risky. Where the tendency is to isolate the problem.
Indeed, to the extent that our technology succeeds so well in providing
solutions to problems, air conditioning, the individual apartments in a
city choked by pollution. For example, salary is wary of technology. I
think we can say that science is beyond the morals, but I think technology
is a moral in the sense that tends to be an oversimplified. Technology
always tries to find in a set of, of problems once facets and and solve it
, solve that facet by doing this, it tends to peel off all the other
elements that are making the problem around problems. So the
oversimplification of technology, Visa vida, let's say the texture of life
is what makes technology always on the brink of being very dangerous so
that technology has always to be somehow reset on his course Bye by the
individual, by the person, by the, by the society that is going to somehow.
So salary cities are intended as man made environments. Large numbers of
people presently in economic and social diaspora will be brought together
in great density implosion of megalopolis. He says his goal is to uplift
civilization and conserve the earth and of course here his work parts
company with nearly all architecture past and present which has served
special interests and short term demands, which is not to say that
salaries are Qala jeez there is no relationship to what man has built
before. There are many precedents and correspondences in scale design and
location of site. Solar shares a sense of scale with a venerable tradition
in architecture, which a good example is piranhas, structures like this
pose challenging design problems except on paper from the air they are too
big to be seen. The tradition of macro structures has remained largely one
of fantasies.
An imaginary funeral monument by bullet. The draftsman put people on the
side of this cenotaph but they're too small at this scale to be visible.
In his book. The metropolis of tomorrow Hugh ferris imagined a future in
new york city, luminous skyscrapers connected on many levels. A vision of
the clean and multilayered city. These were drawn in 1929 before the
construction of the Empire State Building. They are futuristic but by the
standards of accepted building forms rather than for any function in a
radically changed society.
The moving of huge quantities of earth also defines an architectural
tradition relevant to salaries work. The ancient inca citadel of Sasha
Woman reveals an astonishing talent for large scale earthwork and for the
techniques which enable men without advanced technology to build
structures that last for centuries. Machu Picchu two shows this talent in
its finest form and also shows an accommodation with the natural
environment. These forms not only adapt themselves to the outcroppings of
the Andes mountains, but in the end, will look like outcroppings
in europe. The advent of the cannon rendered obsolete many previous
notions of defense walls and gave rise to huge earth fortifications in
depth. Nardine. The Netherlands is a particularly striking example. Modern
technology often involves men in similar tasks to build this concrete
shell in indiana earth was mounted into the exact shape and used as a mold.
The concrete shell was then poured, allowed to harden and jacked up the
dirt mound was then bulldozed away.
People have lived in the earth's surface for centuries, a style called
troglodyte by architectural historians. This is the plan of a village in
north africa. The dwellings are shafts underground.
In some cases, the earth's surface is barely rearranged, as in these oven
shaped layering of mud and stone access is by log steps set into the front
walls.
The obvious analogy to this cave like design is the modern experimental
village habitat built in Canada by Musashi, softy and above ground
logistics system. It attempts to provide privacy with the static and
social unity. A gold sought and achieved by most naive architecture, which
also frequently solves the problem of climate extremes
at Mesa verde in western America indian dwellings were positioned under
rock outcroppings to take maximum advantage of the sun in winter and yet
be shielded from it. In summer, salary is sensitive to considerations of
climate, believing that man ought to be aware of the weather and in tune
with it. The archaeology would temper extremes but will not create an
artificial climate
Talladega and psychology to be built on a damn. The city is brought to the
source of power rather than the other way around. Such large scale efforts
to harness natural power deeply involves man in the responsibility of
treating nature properly.
A turn of the century sketched the city industrial by Tony Garnier was
positioned on a dam of the Rhone River. The idea of dams permeates modern
visionary design, partly perhaps because of the fascination for power
without combustion. The earth's surface is more water than land. Yet men
have rarely established their dwellings on it. Modern technology has made
possible a few beginnings. This floating island supports a ventilating
system connected to a land based industry. Paul may mounts artificial
atoll might be imagined as a potential floating city. Solaris nova noah
designed for the continental shelf for the open sea Proposed population
400,000 Another version would house over two million.
Certain geometries find increasing expression in modern architecture. The
hyperbole Lloyd, for example, a curved surface generated by straight lines.
It has great advantages of structural rigidity and considered as a
building presents maximum internal surface to the sun Buckminster Fuller
used it in his design for the renovation of Harlem Celera uses it in Babel
too.
Crystal forms to run through modern architecture, Bruno tout designed
Crystal House in 1919 to echo the surrounding alpine environment
salaries. Arc village also reflects crystalline forms emphasized in this
picture by the use of translucent material for the model
frank Lloyd Wright's town of the future, spread widely in a rural area.
Every man deserves his own acreage. It was to be a bucolic, well planned
, efficient version of a physical environment that many americans believed
was the backbone of the country. An occasional tower of unmistakable right
design dots this landscape. This is a vision that salary does not share
despite Solaris split with right. However, architectural historians see
definite influences of the late master in salaries work, for example,
right sketch for the community buildings in marin county California and
its realization Solaris Arcosanti long arcades on a monumental scale of
common to both. An early designed by salary. This is his sketch from Mesa
city. It appeared to other architects to be romantic based on organic
forms.
A later work such as Arcosanti seems more attuned to formal geometries and
of course geometry from much older traditions come to mind. This is the
imperial forum of Rome
in the spirit of the technological age, say some critics, designers of
utilitarian things including whole cities invariably gravitate towards
things that look functional things that do the most with the least with
this in mind. They have compared the plans for our colleges with for
example, machine parts, elements of Solaris work also bring to mind the
revival in our time of Earth art, huge expressions outside museum walls
and often is not in virtually inaccessible locations, expressions of the
human desire to mark the earth with man
work by artists like Michael Heizer and walter de Maria seemed to share
with Solari and optimism in the face of the obviously contrary direction
of the artistic marketplace and they share a preference as it happens for
the big spaces of the desert and its beauty.
Yet salary himself is extremely careful to distinguish between form and
function between the thing itself and the appearance of the thing between
fashion and a true aesthetic. I have somehow maybe a peculiar concept
about aesthetics. I make a differentiation with Princeton between the
beautiful and the aesthetic. The beautiful is what nature does, what it's
what man does eventually now and then when he is good enough. And this
happens seldom and through quite a bit of effort and through quite a bit
of pain. So much so that I see the aesthetic process as in a way the last
resort where man fails in a way to find an answer rationally and logically
, and justly, he has to somehow go beyond those categories and and create
aesthetically in order to to survive in a way. So for me, instead of what
I call the stereo genetic process, it's a fundamental for men to become
human. It's something that goes beyond the rationalization of things
beyond the whatever has to do with the just and congress environment and
social environment and so on. It has to do really with the creation of a
new universe. But this is happening now only in fragments and slowly. We
are capitalizing those fragments. So we have a we have a background, for
instance, or poetry or music, sculpture, painting kraftwerk and so on. And
this is a patrimony that helps us to become civilized, but are also
somehow achievements that tend not to be sub subject to obsolescence to
this grinding by of change to this self destruction that we are we are
exhibiting now in every other field. Everything is so it's so temporary.
What means something today. It is meaningless tomorrow. Well, a good
prime is something that doesn't obey those kinds of laws. It has a some
kind of an eternal quality into it, which makes it fundamental. I don't
see why why someone would build this city for you. I mean white white. If
this is the city for only 3000 people, why can't why why can't this be
built? Say in three or four or five years it can be. But you have to be
able to think that you're you're on television that people understand
where I just learned about you. You know, I'm learning things. People find
out maybe they didn't know before. Maybe they can help you think it would
cost to build this city? Well, we estimated if if you have $10,000 per
person would be close to 30 millions, which is probably a little modern.
The shell, but not the whole building. Well, that's reasonable. I should
think you'd be able to do that. Okay. You are very optimistic that the the
the only thing that's really different between art and architecture is
that architecture gets done. Art sometimes doesn't because there's a need
for it. There is they'll need you see as a sculpture, you can not very
often you can afford to do what you want as an architect very seldom. Very
seldom. But we're getting
our problems are really getting very close to these because of the size of
the
cost is just an experiment for you. Which would be finished talking about
quite a bit less. I think your position, I would think your position as a
as a person who undertook the responsibility of where people live and how
they live and how they will get along together. You know, psychologically
, how does this city affect its inhabitants? As opposed to say living
stretched out in L. A. Or pushed in in new york.
You have a you have a position that that that people people they need.
They need you there's a cure. You have a utilitarian function. In fact,
you're a utility bean. If yeah. But unless you're able to convince not
them people that you have, you have an answer or you have a partial answer
at the beginning of an answer,
people are not going to to accept a radical. And so and so you're dealing
with with a society which tends to be conservative and you're trying to
present radical normally the reaction is to destroy what they don't
understand it. No one is trying to destroy in good shape. That's only half
of the solution. Do you do you do you think that you'll get to build one
of the big ones before you die. I don't even think, you know those things
, if they happen, they happen, this doesn't happen. You do your best and
pray.
The work at Arcosanti goes on with dozens of new volunteers every few
weeks. Young people mostly who have heard salary speak on their campus or
have read his book, the city and the image of man. These young people are
attuned to a worldview that puts so many problems in perspective. The
thrust of Solaris philosophy is that man must adopt a new view of himself
as a force in this world and that a new architecture, a new physical
environment is needed for this new man. Next week, in the third of this
four part series, salary addresses himself to several specific challenges
met by archaeology and then a picture essay. His place in the long
tradition of visionary architecture is explored.