One of our goals in the Southwest was to visit relics from past ages – ancestral Puebloan ruins and cliff dwellings, and the more recent Pueblos – which date back up to 700 years.  We started with a visit to Arcosanti, which I thought of as a relic from a prior age that can feel almost as remote  to us now  – the 1970s.

Paolo Soleri was a visionary Italian architect who came to America in the 1940s to study with Frank Lloyd Wright.  He eventually settled in Scottsdale, and began applying techniques he had learned for casting ceramics at the architectural scale.  His compound in Scottsdale – Cosanti – is a truly beautiful place, where dirt was piled up in mounds to make formwork, then concrete was poured on top, and the dirt scooped out to leave domes. However, Soleri was thinking at larger scale the whole time, and laid out his thinking in Arcology, which combined architecture and ecology.  In an age when Americans were happy to build endless sprawl, Soleri recognized the consequences of this pattern, for both the natural environment and human society.  He bought property 70 miles north of Phoenix to begin his prototype urban community, Arcoscanti, in 1970.

Construction has proceeded intermittently since then, with much of Arcosanti’s current fame resting on their production of bronze bells and wind chimes, usually bought as souvenirs of a southwestern vacation to manifest good taste and seriousness.  I had first visited Arcosanti about 20 years ago, and found it a little depressing – a small group of inhabitants who were living in the remnant concrete buildings from the 1970s, making wind chimes and chilling out in the desert, while Soleri mainly lived in Scottsdale.  But Soleri had retired (and subsequently died in 2013), and has been succeeded by Jeff Stein, a Boston architect who had run the architecture programs at Wentworth Institute and the BAC for many years.  I had met Jeff many years ago, and more recently at a HOPES conference in Eugene.  He struck me as a thoughtful and serious person, and so I was curious as to how things might be changing at Arcosanti.

Arcosanti sits isolated out in the desert, on the edge of a small canyon (not unlike the cliff dwellings we’d be seeing).  However, it is connected to Phoenix by Interstate 17, although it is isolated by two miles of very rough dirt road (which did cause every screw in our trailer to come loose).  

The complex faces south, and is mostly constructed of concrete.  The visitors’ building is to the right, and the housing and production buildings to the left.  

The visitors’ building houses exhibits, a store, and a restaurant.  The concrete on the exterior here is showing its age, with some spalling and exposed large aggregate.  

It’s a really clear Brutalist building, showing that Soleri wasn’t an iconoclastic hermit out in the desert, but was in sync with other architects of his era, such as Kahn.  

The shop where they sell the bells (now you recognize them).  

There are some gorgeous models located throughout the complex.  This one shows one conception of the final state of Arcosanti – a series of large apses facing south, which contain community spaces and are ringed by housing units.  For a scale comparison, the parts of Arcosanti which have been already built are shown in grey in the middle of the model – the planned pieces are shown in white.  

A tour brought us through the complex to the ceramic production area

where you can see how the processes used to form the ceramics and bronzes are very similar to the processes used to form the architecture.  The level of detail possible with this sand-sculpting in the formwork is notable.  

The bronze foundry:    

There is a large vault, which can be used for gatherings and performances (and basketball).  

and which opens out to the canyon to the south.  

An amphitheater is surrounded by housing, some of which is for permanent residents, and a few of which are Air Bnbs.    

When I visited here in the 1990s, it all seemed rather low-energy and unfocussed.  It reminded me of Taliesin, where the impetus and vision came from the founder, and the followers were just hanging on to that revealed truth, always wondering WWFLWD when confronted with a new challenge, and eking out a meager living from the legacy.

Arcoscanti feels very different now.  There are constant workshops being offered, which bring in short-term students to learn about Arcology and construction.  There are performances and events, which can bring in attendees from the Phoenix megalopolis.  There are approximately 100 full-time residents, some of whom live in the Camp area, detached houses closer to the farm at the bottom of the canyon.  Construction is moving ahead on some of the concrete buildings.

Soleri’s vision seems even more relevant now than in the 70s. His basic principle is that of building dense, energy-efficient human settlements, which don’t sprawl across the landscape, and so preserve land for agriculture and other uses.  In a very different form, this set of ideas underlays New Urbanism, and various principles which have become conventional planning in the past 30 years.

Millennials are showing a notable preference for denser urban living, often staying in our traditional city cores rather than moving back to the suburbs to spawn.  There are not many models for new urban development at this point – we have accepted the traditional city form and are designing new buildings to fit into that context.  Soleri’s morphology may not be the ultimate solution, but it is a remarkably clear proposal, one which proceeds from first principles and not just an imitation of older forms.  In this way it does resemble Corbusier’s urban proposals, as he laid out his understanding of modern civilization, and tried to come up with a new form that fit those changed conditions.  Soleri stared with a very different set of underlying conditions (recognizing the importance of the environment before most of his contemporaries), and proposed this new model.  Perhaps most encouragingly, the ideas have not remained static:  a newer book, Lean Linear City:  Arterial Arcology, was written by Soleri and some of his followers, showing the development of concepts to fit changing conditions.

Visiting Arcosanti doesn’t feel like visiting the remnants of yet another failed agrarian utopia, which collapsed after the dogma-driven urbanites got bored and went back home.  It is not a rapidly-developing alternative city (probably because no one has figured out to make a lot of money from it), but it is a serious testing ground for a larger vision.  We now recognize the scale of the ecological crisis we are facing as a society, but so far our efforts to correct our course are puny and completely ineffectual.   We keep proposing tweaks around the edges of the existing system.  Arcology may not be the complete solution, but it is one of the few models out there of what a vision for the whole might be, one where the scale of the solution is within an order of magnitude of the problem.

The biggest problem with Arcosanti is its location:  with the likely consequences of climate change in the next century, the edge of the Sonoran Desert is not where you want to be.  Agriculture will not be possible here, as most climate models are predicting a mega-drought this century, similar to the one that contributed to the Ancestral Puebloans abandonment of their settlements 1000 years ago.  Soleri didn’t foresee this, but then neither did anyone else.  He began a small experimental community for up to 5000 people that might have to be abandoned;  we built Phoenix, which with its 4,000,000 residents that will also be gone soon.  At least the Arcosanti residents will be able to hold on longer, as their buildings will shield them in a way that the Phoenix buildings will not.

Even if its geographic location may not endure, the ideas of Arcosanti can still provide a useful model for our society.  I arrived there thinking about the big ideas of cities and ecology and human settlement and the landscape, but the experience quickly shifted my thinking to that of the smaller scales of buildings and spaces.  I hadn’t expected it to be so beautiful.  

The quality of the architectural design and the integration with the outdoor spaces is comparable to an Italian hill town, or as I would discover, some of the Pueblos of the Southwest.    It is architecture and urban design for a new age, but it draws heavily on the best precedents from our past.

Arcosanti wasn’t conceived by a dry planning theorist, but by an artist.  If you have never looked at Soleri’s drawings in Arcology, you should;  Soleri’s vision is right up there with that of other acclaimed visionary architects, such as Lebbeus Woods, but his visions are grounded in an understanding of the fundamental conditions human society is facing, rather than operating at the level of metaphor, or as projections of a purely personal, hermetic vision.   

Soleri also took the great leap of trying to build this vision;  in our recent fascination with paper (or now digital) architecture, we don’t seem to care whether or not a beautiful vision can be built at all – we are happy to bask in the imaginary.  Thom Mayne once pointed out that the quality of architectural rendering would soon reach the point where architects would establish their reputations without ever having to build anything.  Ten years later, we seem to have reached that point.

Or maybe it’s even worse – we are so cynical about ever being able to redirect our profit-driven building-production system that we satisfy our idealistic (yet rational) urges with fantastical imagery.  Soleri didn’t spend thirty years making pretty pictures hoping that eventually some developer would adapt them for a shopping mall (cf. Liebeskind’s building in Las Vegas);  he saw the vision as deriving from the conditions we are facing, and proposed a solution to those problems that, like most brilliant, integrative solutions, was also beautiful and enriching as well as pragmatic.  He thought like an architect, never abandoning his dedication to the larger community, rather than just pursuing his personal vision.

Perhaps in the future we’ll visit Arcosanti as we now visit the abandoned cliff-dwellings, recognizing it as a harbinger, a place where the changing conditions of our world were first recognized and engaged.  

Phoenix is where you can see the Platonic ideal of sprawl – what low-density, car-based development looks like when there is no pre-existing central city to get in the way. To paraphrase Lou Kahn, I asked the sprawl what it wanted to be, and it said Phoenix.

The large cities of the east and midwest existed before cars, and a system of highways and roads had to be retrofitted in and around them to support the new means of transport.  Sub-urbia, as it was then conceived, implied a relationship to a central city.

Los Angeles was not a very big place in the 19th century, and its growth paralleled the rise of the automobile in the pre-war era.  It became the new paradigm for the American city in the early 20th-century.  Los Angeles is our most important car-based megalopolis, and it came to represent the image of sprawl in our collective imagination, with its highways, drive-ins and congestion.

But suburban growth and sprawl really took off in the post-war era. 19th-century cities acquired rings of highways and suburbs, and early 20th-century cities did the same.  American metropolitan areas became almost uniformly low-density around a central city, but with other centers in the region too, as nearby cities were subsumed in the sprawl.

Phoenix exemplifies the new, post-war city.  There was almost nothing there before WWII – it had around 100,000 residents in 1950 (with some more in places like Tempe and Scottsdale). The exponential growth began when developers such as Del Webb realized it could become the retirement center of the west (with its warm weather and vast expanses of cheap land), matching Florida’s role in the east.  Like southern Florida, the Phoenix economy has been largely based upon people moving there and then selling them houses and stuff.  And like every other place in the South or Sun Belt, its habitability is based upon the automobile, air conditioning and television.  Before the widespread adoption of these technologies, there was a sharp limit on how many people would live in a place like Phoenix.

There are several key differences in the urban and regional form of a city like Phoenix and older cities.  Since there was not a high-density central city to and from and through which large numbers of cars had to be moved,  a comprehensive system of high-capacity, limited-access highways was not developed.  (This may also be partly due to Phoenix not existing as a large city when the interstate highway system was initiated in 1956.)  Phoenix is the largest American city I’ve seen where the highway system is not relevant to car circulation in much of the city.

Phoenix didn’t exist in a region of small towns and cities – which then had the spaces between them filled with suburbia until they formed one large metropolitan region – as happened in older regions.  There was some irrigation-based agriculture, and there was a system of canals to serve this, but there wasn’t a significant concentration of population anywhere.  Growth did not happen incrementally or through infill.   A district in Phoenix is usually either a desert, or it is completely developed all at once.

A common sight is moving along an arterial, looking across a desert, seeing another parcel of completed development – and knowing that the desert in the middle will be developed fairly soon.  

The street pattern of Phoenix is based upon the national grid of townships, with major arterial roads occurring every mile.  Since the density of the metropolitan area is fairly uniform, the roadway system can be sized to accommodate the corresponding uniform density of traffic.  Phoenix is a gridded network, not a branching-tree hierarchical system as is seen in much of the rest of the country.  Since the land was undeveloped before WWII, there was no pre-existing system of undersized farm roads which had to either retrofitted with difficulty, or supplanted by the highway system.  So as the districts developed all at once, the roadways could be built at the appropriate size for the ultimate density  

This is a  typical view while driving an arterial in Phoenix – with the neighborhood behind shielded by sound walls.  And while the arterial system is a repetitive grid, the street network within the grid is configured to be as confusing and disconnected as possible – the better to thwart drivers looking for shortcuts across your domain.  

The residential neighborhoods are basically all new, roughly in successive rings out from the center, although leapfrogging development is not uncommon.  Each is completely homogeneous, having been built in large parcels by one builder.  Stylistically, they are all very similar, in a vague southwestern faux-adobe or stucco – it appears that a crop-dusting plane flies over each neighborhood every five years, spraying everything with a coat of Dryvit.  In layout they are more similar to tract houses of their era in other parts of the country than to older houses in the region (following the rule that in a mass culture things vary by time but not by location).  They are walled-off from the street more frequently than is normal in other parts of the country, and you can never be sure what is going on behind those walls.  

There is some isolated great architecture in Phoenix – Taliesin West, Will Bruder’s library, the Arizona Biltmore, etc., but we didn’t see them on this trip.  I had seen them fairly recently, and after getting dragged all around Texas cities, Greta had reached her limit on architecture, and just wanted to blow out of town and get back to the desert as quickly as possible.  I was also daunted but the prospect of slogging through Phoenix traffic – we were staying on the western edge of the region, and most of the architecture was far to the east.  We did brave the Sunday traffic, and I dragged Greta through the downtown, and then lured her to Tempe with the prospect of good food.

Phoenix has two distinct clusters of density.  The region around Camelback is the center of retail, while the downtown is for business, branches of the major universities, and large events – conventions, major league sports and performing arts.  It is nothing like a traditional downtown, more closely resembling an edge city office cluster.  This makes sense, as its history is nothing like a traditional city’s.  Whereas older cities usually have downtowns that retain older buildings and districts, Phoenix has none of this – we found one older building.  The strange inversion of Phoenix is that the downtown is newer than the sprawl.  It’s like the city reached a certain size and then made a decision to have a more dense downtown, and so redeveloped the whole area.

There is a large convention center, which has replicated itself across the street.  

Next door is the Symphony Hall from 1972, the lone institution downtown which exhibits the local solid masonry wall tectonic, a not-inappropriate reference to vernacular pueblo architecture, before it was supplanted by the hegemony of the glass curtain wall (in the desert).  

Arizona State and other universities have opened branch campuses downtown, mostly serving their professional schools and medical complexes.  They are good individual buildings, which are paying a lot of attention to sun screening, and getting a lot of expressive mileage out of that strategy.  

The Arizona State campus contains our favorite thing in the city – a huge cone of net, floating above a plaza, by the artist Janet Echelman (and completed with our colleague Philip Speranza as a consultant).  It really is beautiful, and provides visual entertainment, as you lie in the grass, soaking up the sun.  

Beyond the universities, there are a lot of generic office buildings.  

Leading to the usual Plays with Facades.  

There is a sports district on the south side of the downtown, apparently a baseball stadium and a basketball arena, although it’s hard to tell.  I can’t remember their corporate sponsorship names (but that doesn’t matter, as they will certainly be renamed soon.)  They are in the style that might be called Faux Old Timey, or Times Square Wannabe.  Sports venues used to be Ducks (exhibiting their function in their form).  Now they are often Decorated Sheds, with the exterior being covered with some 21st century architect’s evocation of what the era of urban vitality used to look like.  The exuberance of the facades contrasts with the utter desolation of the streetscape – not a pedestrian to be seen, except when there is a sporting event.  Many cities now have equally dead sports zones, but few go to such elaborate lengths to try to disguise the inherent death of real street life.  

Downtown Phoenix is not very coherent as a city center, but it does have some good buildings.  It was notable that all the interesting architecture has been built by the universities, whereas the more typical downtown buildings of offices and hotels are completely banal.

We moved on to Tempe, looking for the gastropub Greta had selected.  One the way, we discovered some interesting things.  Tempe may have generic buildings too, but everything looks better when you add in a river (dammed at this point to create a wider body of water) and have a butte in the near distance to give the city some scale.

We also visited the Tempe Center for the Arts along the river, designed by Barton Myers, clearly referring to the history of FLW and his followers being active in this area.  It is a very nice building, with simple planes of solid panels and selective use of glazing to open the lobby up to the river on the north.  

Across the street there was a hip new housing development. I’ve never seen apartment buildings before with tail fins.  

The fundamental question about Phoenix (and other late 20th century cities) is whether their character has been inexorably formed by the new way they came into being – sprawl before core – or whether their current character is mainly the result of their being so new.  Will they become more like older cities as they age, or is there something permanently different about them?  We may never see the answer to this in Phoenix.  With NASA’S prediction of a mega-drought occurring in the Southwest in this century, it seems likely that Phoenix will become uninhabitable before it has the opportunity to evolve.  Our trip theme of climate-change-farewell-tour has usually focussed on what will be changing in the natural environment, but the changes that will be coming to cities have become more apparent as we have traveled through Miami, New Orleans and Phoenix.

If you haven’t travelled extensively in an area, you still have many preconceptions about it, formed through what you’ve heard or read or seen on TV – some of which may actually turn out to be true.  Texas was where this became most apparent to me, as I had an abundance of received cultural knowledge and opinions about it, even though I had never before ventured out of DFW.  Although I had travelled through the Southwest a few times, I had never been south of Phoenix, so my opinion of Tucson was similarly secondhand.  All I knew was the syllogism – Tucson:Phoenix as Austin:Houston.  Just as Austin is the place in Texas distinguished by being nothing like the rest of Texas, Tucson is the place in Arizona that symbolically stands in contrast to the horrors of Phoenix.

Tucson is one of those mid-sized American cities (metropolitan area population under one million) which is livable and pleasant due to its not being within the ambit of the flow of global capital, nor prosperous enough recently to have grown exponentially in the past 30 years, when the homogeneous American sprawlscape reached its true apotheosis, and when the banal behemoths of recent skyscrapers have overwhelmed older downtowns.

Tucson also is fortunate in its limiting geography:  just as Portland is hemmed in by the west hills and the rivers, Tucson has mountain ranges to the east and west, so the sprawl in those directions is finite.  Also luckily, large areas of both those mountain ranges have been set aside, both as part of Saguaro National Park, and as other state and local preserves.  We stayed in a county campground adjacent to Saguaro on the west side, one which was so quiet and dark that we could watch the stars and listen to the coyote packs at night;  this is within ten miles of the city.  Phoenix has the misfortune to be in a much larger valley, so the sprawl can go on unimpeded for fifty miles in each direction, while Tucson is about twelve miles wide.  Aerial photos confirm that Tucson hasn’t sprawled very much in the past 30 years, so its suburbs exhibit a blend of the old and the new that can also be seen in its downtown, and which may be the key factor in whether a district has any character or not.  (cf. jane Jacobs again.)

Both cities are college towns, and while the much larger Arizona State dominates the cityscape around Tempe, it feels like a more local phenomenon within Phoenix’s four-million metro area.  The University of Arizona is still large (about 32,000 students), and it seems to be more central to the character of the whole city, as it is less than a mile from the downtown.

We cruised through the suburbs on our way to and from the mountains, and swung by something called Old Tucson, which started out as a movie set back in the 30s, but which is now a western theme park.  We arrived at the end of the day, just as the Wild, Wild West Steampunk convention crowd was leaving.  It was a little scary, and seems to have knocked Greta out of her steampunk fascination, as she has seen the future and it’s not a pretty sight.  

We spent more time in the city core.  The downtown has a lot of buildings from the 60s and 70s, 

which are not gorgeous, but at least they’re not too big.  There are also some not-great institutions, such as the library 

and some newer buildings which aren’t much better.  

The Tucson downtown can’t seem to make up its mind – is it a city downtown, where fabric buildings define the public spaces of the streets and squares, or is it an edge city office park, where object buildings sit isolated in a sea of parking and undefined open space?  The open spaces are just too big, the developable lots are too big, and while the object buildings cry out for attention, they’re really not very good.  Tucson committed only one ghastly error, creating a superblock around their county government campus, where a subterranean parking level may hide a lot of cars, but which disrupts the street pattern and channelizes traffic onto a few big arterials.  The no pedestrian sign is the tip-off of the portal to this netherworld.

I don’t know the history, but it looks like they urban-renewed (bulldozed) their old downtown (or an adjoining neighborhood, probably “blighted”) during the 60s, and replaced it with these towers (versus Eugene which bulldozed its downtown and forgot to build anything new).  And then probably having overbuilt their office market, things ground to a halt.  It’s not great, but it’s fixable. 

The good news is that the adjacent neighborhoods – Barrio Viejo, Armory Park and Iron Horse – were largely left alone.  Today they are the usual mix of gentrifying bungalows, small multi-family projects, light industrial and new commercial that can be seen in many other older city first-ring cores.  There was a reasonable amount of street life in all these areas, even on a Sunday.  The damage was limited to the one core area, and even that is better than many we’ve seen.

The university area, which is surrounded by low-scale residential neighborhoods, felt familiar.  A nice mix of small-scale, old multi-family: 

and upscaling bungalows (the Mini being the universal sign of this), although they are getting some large, privately-developed student housing, just as in Eugene.  

The college-town commercial area is very lively, with many open-air cafes, such as in  this lovely courtyard development.  

The campus itself is beautiful.  It is similar to the University of Oregon, being within a city but with a distinct campus edge, rather than blending into the city fabric.  Also similarly, the campus has a well-landscaped core, with elegant old buildings, all variants on a brick/southwest style, set in manicured lawns.  

But the recent development is the most interesting.  They have done a fantastic job of fitting relatively large, new buildings into the existing framework, not overwhelming the scale of the campus, nor adhering slavishly to stylistic prescriptions (both of which happened at the University of Texas).  The buildings themselves are also good to excellent, and are notable for the uniformity with which they have addressed environmental issues (primarily sun-shading) in this desert environment.  An older US government building on the edge of the campus has a screen wall which defines a courtyard:

A new building at the business school has a south-facing facade which utilizes both palm trees and a sophisticated brise-soleil for shading.  

Even spotted from a long way across campus, my instincts told me that this was the architecture school.  It is in fact a large addition to design college (CAPLA), designed almost ten years ago by Jones Studio, in Tempe.  The environmentally-responsive diagram is completely straightforward:  a long east-west bar, with extensive and deep shading on the south side.  

There are architectural shading elements, as well as a framework for plants, and a garden area where a native landscape is nurtured and used for installations.   

The east and west walls are mostly blank, with circulation 

and access into an openable shop on the ground floor.  

The north side, which faces a major arterial, is glazed for daylighting the studios.  

An excellent building, which takes it cues from the strong determinative forces of climate and program, and which articulates those in a systems-driven building with elegant detailing.  It is a truism that in most places, the new architecture building is usually the worst building on campus – architects seem to feel the need to make a design  “statement” when given such a visible project.  It was a pleasure to see Jones Studio take an opposite tack, and do all the sensible moves really well, illustrating what an architecture driven by substantive ideas rather than style can be like.

I don’t know much about the architecture department at the university, but outside the university’s downtown center, I spotted this amazing sign:  

They seem to think that it is a good idea for their faculty to be involved in the design of architecture;  in fact, they celebrate it!  This is probably good for their accreditation, and even good for their students’ education, but I don’t know how they can maintain this attitude within the confines of a big research university, where the preference for the written article over the designed building has become almost universal.  (If it hadn’t been a Sunday I might have dropped in to explore job opportunities, as they appear to be deficient in the proportion of cranky old guys on their faculty.)

There is an even newer, bigger showcase building on the south edge of campus – the Engineering and Natural Resources Building 2, designed by Richärd+Bauer and GLHN, both from Phoenix.  It opened last year, and has been lauded for its sustainability performance and its support for interdisciplinary efforts.  The south elevation has a functional yet expressive shading system,

with an occupiable colonnade tucked under the building edge, offering respite from the busy arterial.  

The north facade has a thinner variant on the shading system.  

The middle of the building is a deep courtyard, which supports daylighting and ventilation strategies, and which works metaphorically as a slot canyon.  

Another building where the ideas of building performance drive the architectural expression;  something is clearly going on in the university culture, if they are producing so many fine buildings.  We saw one more element, which simultaneously puts the University of Arizona at the forefront of sustainability, livability and hipness:

There are lessons we could learn from this university, and lessons both positive and negative at the city scale.  I had my limited preconceptions about Tucson before we visited, but the reality turned out to be even more interesting.