On Growth

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10. Paolo Soleri

Paolo Soleri was born in Torino, Italy, in 1919. He studied at the University of Torino where he received his doctorate in architecture. He came in 1947 to the United States on a Frank Lloyd Wright fellowship. Since 1962 he has lived in Arizona. Two Guggenheim grants permitted Soleri to complete his studies in the field of architecture as human ecology.
Soleri created the Cosanti Foundation, a nonprofit urban research organization now established in Scottsdale, Arizona, his headquarters. Arcosanti, a self-teaching community for 3,000 in north central Arizona, is currently under construction. Arcosanti will be the first urban environment designed according to the principles of archology, the complete living system to host life, work, education, culture, leisure and health.
Soleri has published Archology: The City in the Image of Man (1969) and The Sketchbooks of Paolo Soleri.

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You have seen Limits to Growth.

I have seen the book, I went through it quickly. In many ways I am more optimistic than the material of the book may imply.

What brought you to your redesigning oeuvre of urban civilization?

The conviction that urban civilization is going to pieces. I believe that life is a phenomenon of implosive character and not of explosive character. Anything that has to do with life, with life instrumentation or life development, has to present very clearly this character of implosiveness as against explosiveness. That's why I am very much sold - or somebody might have said stuck with - the idea of complexity and miniaturization.

Your future dwellings are based on miniaturization in an effort to rehumanize man?

I don't think really we can start anything by basing our actions only or purely on past experience, which starts with Adam and Eve. I think it's a syndrome that is very pervasive. Many scholars are going about their business of finding reasons or explanations for phenomena by implying that reality begins with the life of man. In reality it begins far, far before man even appears in this world, perhaps three billions years ago.

Nature as the furnace of the sun.

That was the question - the sentence was coined to present nature in the light which is not the romantic light of niceness, prettiness or arcadia. Nature is far more powerful, far more demanding and far more complex than our romantic ideas.

Cruel, too.

Nature is, because of the vastness of the phenomenon, in a way very indifferent to any formal life. Life is in a sense the encroachment of a very specific thing on the phenomenon which does not give a damn about life itself. We have to be able to find ways of keeping at bay this cruelty and this indifference by using nature at the same time. Humanizing, if it means anything, means producing more spirit by transforming more matter, in a way the transformation of matter into spirit

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is what life is. So unless humaneness is geared to this, humaneness does not mean very much.

If you talk about humanizing cities, where does aggression come in?

In my opinion, this theory of aggression is only relatively true and it has not been demonstrated really. If we take crowding at an animal level, we might be right in objecting to it. If we take crowding at a cultural level, that crowding is caused by the media by which culture develops. Which explains why the city has become more and more the center of civilization. It's there where the pressure of things becomes critical, where things happen or start to quicken.

By redesigning our urban dwellings, do you also take into account the redesigning of consciousness?

Consciousness has been designed in a way by the environment. We would not be what we are unless the earth had a certain diameter, moved at a certain distance from the sun. We are environmentally defined. There's no escape from that, and that's why we are unique. The position of the relationship between the earth within the solar system and what the solar system is, is defining in a very definite way the morphology of what we are. That is what you may call the nonwilled part of life.

Where the willed part of life comes in I cannot follow through with Skinner. There is something more to it than reacting to punishment or reward. I cannot explain the behavior of a person through positive reinforcement. There's more to it than that, I am quite convinced, in saying that by defining a new environment, you redefine man, as Skinner does. We are in a way what our environment is. We can only develop if the environment around us is carried into new levels of quality of performance.

Do you feel that your way of designing urban centers will also promote the collectivization of consciousness?

I am very much in agreement with Teilhard de Chardin when he says that in order to have a better person, you have to have a better society; and in order to have a better society, you have to have a better environment. The more society becomes a true cooperation of individuals, the more individuals will be personalized. There is no contradiction here.

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There is some reinforcement which does go back to Skinner in a way.

When you sit down at your table to design, are thoughts of how to bring people closer together on your mind?

I am not sitting down ever to design dwellings for people. I think I'll find out the relationship which is absolutely fundamental. I am trying to illustrate this relationship. Nobody has asked me to design a city as yet. So I haven't designed it. But the materials that I've been producing are just symbols of schematic definitions and explanations of an idea. The idea stands for this methodology, that says every time you've something more lively, you have also something more complex. Every time you have something more complex, automatically - by the nature of complexity - you have something which one must miniaturize. So if you are hoping to come out with something which serves life, you have to come out with something which is automatically more complex and automatically more miniaturized.

We have been mostly talking in terms of the Western world. Would it be possible for the Third World,¹ where the real crowding is, like India, to build your kind of cities?

Not only possible, in a way it's going to be mandatory. It is true at this point where we begin to think that the amount of matter and energy available is limited. At this point we have to find ways of not punishing life by limiting growth, but by a transformation, a quantum jump into something which is quite different.

This is in a way the interiorization of more matter into what you might call new landscapes for man. What I am advocating is the interiorization of the city. Make the city into an interiorized milieu, which becomes in a way a new organism. By doing so you achieve a new economy. This economy is utterly connected and tied to this process of spiritualization. Each new organism is an interiorized universe; and organisms somehow get together and work together to produce systems which are more able to grasp and to make use of the environment. The beehive is a good example. The termite colony is a good example. There are many, many examples.

You make these beehives livable.

No. You would want to introduce the human element in these supersys-

1 The author uses the term ‘Third World’ rather as an abbreviation describing the developing nations and does not accept this term in the meaning it is usually given, as if there were such a thing as a third world.

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tems. And what's a human element? It's the mental element which displays itself in fundamentally intercultural expressions. We must do at the human level and the social and cultural level what the bee has been able to do at the biological level. This translates the beehive into the city. To be appalled by the analogy, I am afraid, is not to grasp what those supersystems are able to do for the person or for the individual. For the bee they evidently are very essential for the survival and for the development of the bee life. For mankind they are going to be essential and very positive instruments for the development of man. Keep in mind that cooperation is fundamental to life. Nobody can survive for one day without almost full cooperation from people, organizations, institutions, all sorts of routine mechanisms.

But when you inject the mental and cultural elements from, say, Calcutta, you hit an entirely different world.

Survival is one thing - if your goal is survival, then Calcutta might just be a way to go about. But survival is the basis for something much more hopeful. So to be able to define a good beehive does not mean as yet to define a good city or a good environment for persons to develop in. Those are instruments and as such might only be sufficient for a very limited kind of phenomenon. You'd keep in mind that the instrument is one thing and the creator or the musician is something else. If you want to produce music, you need some kind of device, if only the vocal chords. That does not mean that one would become a great singer or a great composer. If we want to produce a civilization, we need the instruments that are permitting production. Going back to Limits to Growth, I only think that this study says that it might be advocated they should be translated into a quantum jump, as I was saying. A quantum jump, where more is done with less, which is what complexity is able to do and the physical side of this is the miniaturization process.

That is archology, another one of your inventions?

That is what archology is trying to illustrate. To achieve it is something else.

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Should archology become the ultimate instrument for human collectivization?

If there is an evil intention somewhere and this evil intention is going to develop, is going to flourish and the media can be penetrated even archology could not stop them. In fact, it might become a good instrument for evildoers. But that's a chance we have to take. But two equate to two does not make any sense, also because we ourselves are collectivized phenomenons. The billions of cells that are composing each one of us is a good example of a phantastically organized and beautifully coordinated and automized kind of universe. To reject those aspects as if they were against life is to ignore what life is preponderantly. We must go beyond that, but we cannot go beyond that by rejecting it. We must go beyond that by incorporating it into the development of life.

Would you say that what you are trying to do is to achieve a transformation of human life, both mentally as well as architecturally?

Architecturally in a sense of environment; mentally in the way this environment would be used by individuals that find themselves within that environment. The starting point is that this environment would permit the person or the group to go about the business of life in a more efficient way. That means an environment which is more responsive to the aims of people or to anyone. One can make a very good example about the frustrations that the cities of today are causing in society because they do not deliver the goods they are supposed to be delivering. The fundamental good is information. We guard any kind of gathering of interaction in life for the sake of information. We want to know. We want to know, because we want to perform and we can only perform when we know. That's why life is a gathering, is an implosion, is a cooperation. In order to know more and to act more. If the environment defeats this goal, then this environment is antilife. And this is what the metropolis today is simply trying to do, to defeat this interaction, this knowing, this finding out, this connecting, this cooperation and so on. It tends to segregate too many things, it tends to put too many obstacles to too many things until the person becomes lost and reacts violently or aggressively. The basis is instrumental. The goal is beyond the instrumental.

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Are you hopeful that some day your ideal will come through, will be realized?

I guess so. Although the current interest might be just curiosity.