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Well well! Funny to see this on Hacker News. This is something I can speak towards: I lived at Arcosanti for five years, and knew its founder well. I wrote his

• jimworm 12y ago
  I learned about Arcosanti from the arcologies in SimCity 2000, and have maintained some curiosity since. How does it feel to live in Arcosanti, compared with life in a "regular" city?
  • nkoren 12y ago
    It's very different. Much of this is due to the fact that it's a very small population (fluctuating between 60-100 people during the time I was there) living about 35 miles from anywhere remotely consequential. So much of its flavour is due to simply to being relatively deeply embedded in nature. When I moved back to a "regular" city (in this case, Phoenix), the two biggest shocks were the loss of the night sky, and the fact that "regular" cities are straight-up engineered to kill you. The failure to look both ways before crossing the street is a death sentence; this made walking around a city feel like an exercise in continually dashing between some cold-war-era Berlin-wall no-man's land. Took me years to become habituated to this, and it still bugs me if I think about it. In many ways, Arcosanti is like any other small, rural, company town. Everybody is always up in everybody else's business; the politics of the company are all-pervasive and often petty; and if you want to achieve aspirations which aren't within the scope of the official agenda, you leave. On the other hand, living there is extraordinarily easy: the pay is low but the expenses are practically nil. The average American spends 2/3rds of their earnings on housing and transport; at Arcosanti, those things cost $150/month. I earned minimum wage and could still afford to go skydiving every other weekend. I've never had so much leisure time or disposable income since. It's a place of weirdly limited and expansive horizons. Like I said: if you wish to do something other than what the company is doing -- start your own full-time business, take your concept of "arcology" in a different direction, etc. -- then you can't do that there. It's not a real city: it's a company town. On the other hand, it attracts a constant stream of quite high-calibre, globally-connected people; late night conversations around the fireplace can be pretty special experience. I recall getting into good-nature drunken arguments with folks like Stephen J. Gould, Jaron Lanier, and Terry Riley. Not a bad place for a teenage hacker to grow up.
    • chiph 12y ago
      I recall reading about it in Omni magazine, many years ago. What are their goals these days? If I recall correctly, originally it was to be a proof-of-concept for a new way of building cities, to demonstrate that you don't have to have suburbs to have a livable home.
      • avn2109 12y ago
        >> "...to demonstrate that you don't have to have suburbs to have a livable home." Hasn't that already done by literally everywhere that isn't the sprawl-blighted, car-centric parts of North America and Australia?
      • deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
• state 12y ago
  Nice to see another architect on HN. I only visited Arcosanti once, and in my brief visit (around 2005) I found the intellectual environment to be pretty dogmatic and deeply skeptical of technology. Being an architect with a strong technical background I found this strange. It seemed like if there were a place that could be thinking deeply about how architects can productively use technology Arcosanti would be the place. The environment you describe in your other reply makes me think that perhaps this wasn't always the case. Could you talk a little more about the intellectual climate during your stay? Was there a period where people were able to see Soleri's thinking as more of a springboard than a rigid system?
  • nkoren 12y ago
    The intellectual climate at Arcosanti waxes and wanes quite considerably. It has gone through numerous ups and downs since my time there. I visited for a couple of days last summer and found it to be mid-swing -- couldn't tell if it was on the way up or on the way down -- but when it's up, it can be very diverse and lively, with many seemingly polarised subgroups. Depending on who you talk to, you can come away from Arcosanti thinking that it's a bunch of Žižek-spouting primitivists, Kurzweil-spouting extropians, mildly paranoid right-wing survivalists, or reasonably dispassionate architecture graduates with a somewhat environmental bent who were just looking for a stimulating internship. One of Arcosanti's strengths is that it can accommodate all of these types simultaneously. But tour guides are given/take quite broad latitude in terms of how they present the project, so depending on who shows you around, you can come away with an impression that it's only one of the above subgroups, when in fact it's all of them. From what I could see, that tradition continues today, although not quite as vibrant as during my mid-90s tenure. Although Arcosanti accommodates many different modes of thought, paradoxically it's been relatively hostile to people who want to push on the boundaries of urban planning and design. When I came there, I was quite enamoured of Soleri's "arcology" theory (and today I still am) -- but ultimately, I disagreed with him that cities could be designed as fixed objects; I argued with him that cities were processes, not objects, and that what we really needed to be studying was what kind of processes would lead to arcological outcomes. Soleri, however, was quite defensive and dogmatic about his theory, so I had to leave to pursue that particular thread. Ideas which don't particularly impinge upon the built form are far more welcome there. This has been a shortcoming of the place for decades. I'm hopeful that it will be able to reinvent itself, post-Soleri, to overcome this limitation.