In the Image of Man

The students clustered around Paolo Soleri have to strain to hear him. His voice never rises much above a whisper, and even after 20 years in this country the accent of his native Italy thickens it. Periodically, light planes pass through the desert sky; motorcycles putter off to town on the road just beyond the low dunes; ceramic and metal bells clunk and gong with the wind. But no one's attention wanders.

"There are two gas stations, a restaurant and a bar, and that's about it," Soleri says, describing Cordes Junction, a little settlement that sits like a bewildered prospector just off a winding superhighway 60 miles north of Phoenix. "The people are conservative. They are the children of the old-timers, the real old-timers. I beg you, if you must smoke pot, don't talk about it in the village."

Tomorrow these high school and college students--and dropouts--will begin six weeks of labor at a construction site off a dirt road winding away from Cordes Junction, a privilege for which each of them has paid $340. For now, they are bivouacked here at the very edge of the town of Paradise Valley, which is contiguous with the suburban sprawl of Scottsdale, itself part of the low sprawl of Phoenix. They sit cross-legged and half clothed on the broad shoulder of a raised, free-form swimming pool under a concrete canopy that weighs 20 tons but looks light as tortoise shell. The pool is one of a dozen cast-concrete structures, ranging in complexity from band-shell-like apses to finished houses, that Soleri and earlier disciples have set into this narrow patch of desert since 1956. Collectively, the buildings are called Cosanti, which translates as "against things," or "antimaterialism." The megastructure for 3000 people that the youngsters think they are going to work on up north tomorrow is called Arcosanti. The most important of Soleri's many activities takes place a few yards away, in the drafting room connected to the conventional ranch house in which he lives. There, day by day, he fills the pages of the seventh of a series of sketchbooks where all his ideas take their first form. These remind everyone who sees them of Da Vinci's notebooks, and if the schemes in them are half as important as Soleri thinks they are, the comparison will be appropriate.

Following the admonition about marijuana and a few words on the permanent workers at Arcosanti--a first-day-at-camp briefing--Soleri asks for questions. In response to an early one, he sketches in the history of Phoenix as he knows it: how the construction of the Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River in 1911 was followed by a wave of people coming to the area for health reasons, which triggered a general tourist influx. The dam also created a farming area, but the developing city is eating up the farmland around it. "If you fly over the city," Soleri says, "you see that this area of arable land--which is not very vast--is being taken over by suburbia. The farmers can make more money selling to land developers than growing crops."

The houses that only recently have reached what was an isolated tract when Soleri and his wife came to camp on it 15 years ago are high-priced stylizations of ranch bunkhouses and Spanish villas, and they surround a metropolis the commercial sections of which would have made Da Vinci bug-eyed by their ugliness. Thanks in part to a campaign led by Barry Goldwater, some of the rough diminutive mountains that Phoenix is built against have been saved from development, but their preservation is nearly the only intelligent thing the people of the valley have done for the appearance of their surroundings. One almost never sees Phoenix except from the woolly interior of an air-conditioned car, and then as a grid of broad bare avenues lined with auto agencies, stores, gas stations and branch banks, most of them set off in their own parking lots and heralded by startling signs. The city has little more of the feel of the Southwest to it than U. S. Route 1 in Saugus, Massachusetts.

A student asks what the arcologies--Soleri's compact, single-structure cities--have to do with the problems of existing cities.

"Well, we know what the kind of developments that we are building now do," he says. "They gulp land. They isolate people from one another, from the institutions of the city and from nature. They impose an ecological burden that is absolutely staggering. To keep things moving in a city, we are required to pay enormous costs. First, we are required to buy a car every two or three years and to maintain it, feed it, store it. Beyond that there are all the cycles that are initiated and never closed. We are paying by having the skies gray, the rivers going to pieces. Even the oceans are starting to be polluted. An endless waste of price tags. The creatures that are supposed to be served by this physical environment become less and less sane, because they see themselves as prisoners, physically even, of their condition. Beyond that, they see themselves as having jobs that are worse than having no jobs: They work to produce pollution."

The student interrupts: "What I meant were the problems of the city core, which are problems of congestion...."

"No," Soleri says. "They are not problems of congestion, they are problems of dereliction. When something goes derelict, you have also congestion. But it's the fact that we never cared about the public aspect of the city. And if you ignore the public aspect of the city, you may as well ignore the city, because the city is made up of what is common among the people. If the streets are abandoned, if the courtyards are abandoned, if the schools are abandoned--all the institutions that have somehow to do with the communal patrimony--then naturally you have the problems of cities. But congestion is just a consequence of physical and mental bankruptcy."

Soleri is perched on an upcropping of concrete that makes a stool, and wears a sleeveless T-shirt, a greenish-yellow stretch bathing suit with a diamondback pattern in the waistband, dark-green anklets and black-and-white sneakers. His ears peak close to his head and his eyes in the sun are black houndstooth checks. His bare slender legs are long-muscled like a frog's and he clasps one knee like a resting dancer. Often many seconds pass before anyone asks a question. Through these pauses, he doesn't fidget at all. He looks at the students with a faint smile, as if trying to guess which will think himself ready to open his mouth.

Someone had asked earlier about ESP; there is a remark now about the beauties of the Eastern mind and the proposition is put forward that the world would be better off if America had been left to the Indians. Soleri says he thinks ESP is a low level of communication. He identifies himself as very much a Westerner ("I agree with Teilhard de Chardin that in order to be really Christian today, you must embrace technology"). And he resists the sentimentalization of the Indian. Yet with each question he is patient and careful, apparently resolved to believe that every student is intelligent, even in the face of the undergraduate fantasies and infatuations of the hour.

A girl tells Soleri that both her mother and her history teacher were appalled at the prospect of living in arcologies; the teacher had met her enthusiasm with the stories about what overcrowding does to rats, an argument Soleri has evidently heard before.

"Your history teacher wasn't being very historical," Soleri says softly. "History is basically culture. You give me a society of rats that has any culture at all and I will eat them all. The rat society is a social system of some sort and human society is a cultural system. It's a quantum jump. To relate the two is shallow and very dangerous. It might well be that we as humans need exactly the sort of conditions the rat cannot stand. In other words, as cultural creatures, we have to crowd.

"Now I'm not suggesting that we shrink living spaces--though I have suggested that we could shrink people to a certain degree. Giantism is certainly not the best route for any species to take. But my idea is mainly a matter of taking away the dead spaces. And there are so many dead spaces. The largest set of them, of course, is everything that is given to the car. If you took all the roads and parking lots out of the city, it would immediately shrink to half its size."

"I think in the case of my mother," the girl says, "and with a lot of us, the reaction against arcologies is because the only experience most of us have had with very dense housing is slums, the ghetto."

"Again," Soleri says, "the ghetto is a corruption--a degeneration--of the city. (continued on page 206)Image of Man(continued from page 168) If you take the worst of any phenomenon, you can condemn the phenomenon. I don't know what the background of your mother is, but if she had lived in a successful city--and I'm thinking of a European city--then possibly her outlook would be different. To take a person who was born in the country and who goes into the city only occasionally and then finds things that are displeasing, and to teach this person that the city is possibly a great phenomenon is just about impossible. Things of that nature have to be experienced."

He is asked which cities he considers successful. "Until the Second World War, at least, there were many towns and cities in Europe that you could call successful, in the sense that the people living in those cities really were part of a cultural and social system that was giving them something of substance. I would call the city where I was born--Torino, fifty years ago--very successful."

• • •

What was, at least in memory, the integrated, substantive cultural and social life of Turin, Italy, was set in a compact grid of streets and parks and plazas on the left bank of the Po, facing cultivated hills in one direction and the peaks of the Alps in the other. From the time he was five, Soleri was taken to the mountains for weekend hikes, leaving him, he says, with a love for wilderness and for heights. At 18, offered only a course in architecture and one in civil engineering, he chose art over technology. With interruptions for 22 months of service with the Italian army engineers and periods of work for his family and for tuition, Soleri was 26 when he finally got his doctorate from the Turin Polytechnical Institute. But the degree was with highest honors and shortly after receiving it he was accepted as an apprentice by Frank Lloyd Wright. He joined the master at Taliesin West--the complex of low-lined studios, living quarters and geometric gardens set like flagstones into the McDowell Mountains ten miles north of Scottsdale.

The differences between Cosanti and Taliesin today obscure their similarities. Like Soleri in his first years in Paradise Valley, Wright spent his first winter at Taliesin, in the Thirties, camping out. Wright thought of his students as apprentices to the master, and the 30 young architects who pay $2500 a year today to work at Taliesin are the establishment counterparts of Soleri's motlier crews. The two studios even share the problems of blight: While affluent suburbia slowly surrounds Cosanti, the very reason for being of the Taliesin site--the view to the south, toward Cosanti--was marred in 1963 by a procession of high-tension wires marching across the hillside. (Wright was unable to interest his neighbors in a joint venture to put the lines underground.)

But the spirit of radical innovation assuredly resides today at Cosanti, not at Taliesin. The major commission of the prosperous architectural firm Wright left behind is for a palace and a vacation home for the sister of the shah of Iran. And if it can get its hands on the land around Taliesin, it plans to dot the hills with a resort hotel, a motor inn and golf courses.

After a year and a half at Taliesin, it became evident that Soleri was not constituted to work on someone else's designs; he left Wright in 1949 and camped out with a fellow ex-apprentice on nearby Camelback Mountain. Eventually they were tracked down there by Mrs. Leonora Woods, a Pittsburgh socialite looking for someone to design a desert home for her at less than Taliesin prices. The house they built achieved national recognition for its roof--a glass dome with an opaque panel that rotates with the sun. And before it was finished, Soleri married Mrs. Woods's daughter, Colly, who looks more like a pretty clubwoman from someplace like Winnetka, Illinois, than the wife of an underfunded Italian genius.

Following the birth of his second daughter, Soleri returned to Italy, where he thought he might open his own studio. That hope failed to materialize, but during his stay there he won his first major commission--for a ceramics factory on the Amalfi Coast. With an open, dramatic interior and an exterior of inverted cones that reflect and blend with the cliffs they hug, the building is regarded as an unusually successful experiment.

Since his return to the United States in 1954, Soleri has built only one structure--a theater for the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe--besides the uncommissioned structures at Cosanti. He supported himself for years on the income from the sale of ceramic wind bells, the molds for which were holes that he dug with his hands in the desert silt. Today, conventionally cast bronze and aluminum bells have been added to the trade and a younger brother imported from Italy supervises all the casting. And much of Soleri's income, which he channels through the Cosanti Foundation, comes from his lecture tours. Yet he still spends evenings carving Styrofoam forms for the cast arms from which clusters of the bells are hung, and still himself etches the strong designs into the molds that give them their character.

Most of the buildings at Cosanti were as primitively cast as the bells. First Soleri and his apprentices would bulldoze the earth into a low mound. Then they'd cut ridges in it for reinforcing rods and pour concrete over it. Sometimes paint would be spread over the dirt and the concrete would pick up a dull, deeply embedded coloring. When the concrete had hardened, the piled dirt and a few feet of the desert floor were excavated. The resulting structures are exquisitely adapted to their site--providing shade in the summer, when the sun is high, and gathering the warmth of the low winter sun--and the wind bells are among the finest crafted objects in the country. But neither the buildings nor the bells have much to do with the growing international interest in Soleri. That derives from his vision of the universe and man's place in it, and especially from the structures and philosophy of arcology--the word blends architecture and ecology--which, he's convinced, is crucial to the next step in the cultural evolution of the species.

Soleri's thought begins with the Scholastic truth that in the progression from matter to vegetal and then animal life, and finally to the human brain, there is an increase not only in complexity but in compactness. He argues that compactness is the essence of life--"life is in the thick of things"--and that evolution tends toward density, away from dispersion. "In its evolution from matter to mind," Soleri writes, "the real has been submitted to numerous phases of miniaturization so as to fit more things into smaller spaces in shorter times. This process, from haphazardness and dislocation to coordination and fitness, has been mandatory because each successive form of reality carried in itself a greater degree of complexity. Any higher organism contains more performances than a chunk of the unlimited universe light-years thick, and it ticks on a time clock immensely swifter. This miniaturization process may well be one of the fundamental rules of evolution.

"Now that the inquietude of man is turned to the construction of the super-organism, which society is, a new phase of miniaturization is imperative. Arcology is a step toward it." In other words, the philosophy that Soleri calls arcology, and the buildings that that philosophy demands, buildings which he also calls arcologies, are nothing less than a necessary next step in the development of society. For a time in the late Fifties, Soleri turned to the idea of harnessing the energy of the sun in individual reflector-generators on the roofs of spread-out individual dwellings. But he soon decided that the pattern of the broadleaf, while efficient for photosynthesis, is grossly inefficient as a pattern for almost everything else, and especially for the settlements of men. Flatness gobbles land and greenness. Because people and goods have to be moved great distances in the two dimensions of the horizontal city, transportation networks squander energy. More importantly, the flatness debilitates and suppresses the individual. Once a man is positioned within a square mile of suburbia, he's effectively cut off from nature. Only experiences that can be transmitted electronically aren't hindered by dispersion. All the other contacts that enrich life--nights at the theater, visits to museums, face-to-face encounters with family, friends and strangers--are made so difficult by the spread-out city that we cut them out and surrender ourselves to what the electricity will deliver.

The arcologies that Soleri sees as the sane alternative to today's cities and suburbs are three-dimensional mega-structures, usually several hundred stories high and proportionally broad at the base. They look like aircraft carriers, or dams, or gargantuan crystals, and correspond not to plants but to animals. Like the higher organisms, cities can in fact ingest and store concentrated energy from many sources, and the tasks performed in cities are of a complexity and delicacy analogous, Soleri says, to those performed by the organs of the body--specifically, the human body. Thus, the city in the image of man, which is the title of Soleri's first book.

The arcologies would, undeniably, offer great environmental and economic savings. Most of the cost of transporting goods would disappear. All the systems of the megastructures--including the centralized industrial complexes most would have--would be closed, the waste of one process filtering usefully through another. Cars would be used only to get from one arcology to another or to explore the surrounding wilderness. Every institution of learning in the city would be closer--for everyone--than most schools are now for their own students. Medical personnel would walk to house calls the way they make rounds in hospitals. Man would live on the skin of the arcology, facing in one direction a city any part of which he could reach in 15 or 20 minutes by elevator, moving sidewalk or his own locomotion, and in the other the face of nature, marred only by a few access highways and rail systems and, in the distance, the homes of those who choose to live apart.

This is the bare outline of the argument as it leads to arcologies, but no summary can do justice to the richness of the full Soleri intellectual construction. Arcology: The City in the Image of Man, which flops open to a width of four feet, includes not only drawings of the arcologies but page after page of diagrams that give graphic shape to a unified metaphysical vision. In one, Fate, which is described as "entropic, statistical, granular, indifferent, static, rational, structural, torpid, automatic and amorphous," is contrasted with "joyful, conscious, harmonious, super-structural, superrational, dynamic, compassionate, pervasive, willful and complex Destiny." In another, a vector labeled "the aesthetocompassionate metamorphosis" soars out of a black puddle representing "anguish reduced to a nonshrinkable residual." Except for someone willing to steep himself in Soleri's thought, this is shorthand theorizing and virtually inaccessible--but great fun nevertheless. All the writing is alternately obscure and powerful, sometimes in consecutive sentences: "It is the naked mind and the desensitized body that find an obsolescent environment to their liking," he writes in his second book, The Sketchbooks of Paolo Soleri. But then: "They indeed are alike, both sensing the presence of a dark chasm of senselessness only one step ahead of themselves, as if man's Fall reflected itself endlessly on the sloping bastions of a deterministic and indifferent universe."

There is much rage in the texts, and it is always well turned: "The atomistic nature of suburbia plays the sweetest song to the production madness of 'free' enterprise. Nothing is indeed sweeter than raping nature and getting dollar bills in return, with its concomitant exhilarating power. Forests are transformed into cheap lumber, then cheaper shelters, from wilderness to slums in a matter of half a generation."

And the impersonality of big government is as contemptible to him as the excesses of unbridled free enterprise: "As the city cannot be speculative, so it cannot be a handout by 'authority.' The handout never cares. It is indifferent, just another aspect of the speculative exercise. Any care it may have had at its origin has been lost in bureaucratic meanders and their parasitic agents. Care is a first-person undertaking. The care of the citizen is the sap of the city. But one can care only for that which one loves. Lovableness is the key to a living city. A lovely city is not an accident, as a lovely person is not an accident."

• • •

The question, of course, is whether the arcologies would constitute cities of love or a new architecture of fascism. "As architecture," critic Thomas Albright has written, "Soleri's designs seem reactionary rather than revolutionary in concept, attempting to impose a rationale on the ugliest, most irrational features of urban life--high density, plastic sterility, overcentralization--and freezing them in inflexible monuments whose cost would tend to make them permanent features of the landscape, as impervious to change as dinosaurs.... His models look like Platonic or Euclidean ideal forms into which human needs have been arbitrarily poured, edited and redefined--ideal forms for one man's notion of an ideal society."

A couple of ideas are wrong in this: High density isn't an ugly aspect of urban life, it's the rough essence of it. And if Soleri's principles are correct, society would want the arcologies to be permanent--that is, if we've retained at all the ability to plan projects intended to last beyond our lifetimes. The men who built Notre Dame didn't worry about permanently scarring the landscape of Paris; and it's hardly a defect in Soleri's vision that young people have adjusted to the thought of living in temporary inflatables in the woods.

But Albright's assertion that Soleri seems to ignore human needs is justified. "Social, ethical, political and aesthetic implications are left out," Soleri writes in The City in the Image of Man, "as they are valid and final only if and when physical conditions are realistically organized." The students at the swimming pool wanted to know both how the arcologies would change the people who lived in them and what sort of government Soleri envisioned for them. He answered neither question lucidly, beyond saying that he expects the arcologies to produce surprising and positive changes in people--"they would inspire you rather than frustrate you"--and that no one would be coerced to live in them. When asked directly if he thought the compact city would lend itself to totalitarian control, he did somewhat better, noting that Papa Doc Duvalier had been able to control spread-out, low-technology settlements very well. The systems of an arcology would obviously lend themselves to computerization, but "having the computer take care of the red and green lights is not an imposition on the freedom of man." The smoothly operating systems will, in fact, liberate people, Soleri claims: "If you don't want to take that escalator, you move to the next one. You have more options. There's more fluidity, more choice. And the basic choice is that you can get from one place to another, which is not the choice you have now."

All this is more vague and evasive than it need be. Soleri in fact knows the kinds of changes he expects the arcologies both to produce and to reflect, but they have to be deduced from widely separated, sometimes dense, passages in the two books. "Perhaps a metamorphosis of the protogilded encasement for an asphyxiating society may mean the uncovering of a different set of values, better aligned with the basic tenderness of the human constitution," he writes in The City in the Image of Man. The search is for "an urban society seeking to contain the robotization of man." Flesh is tender, and "the burgeoning monster flower of automation must be handled with great care lest we become robots." Ultimately, the goal is the creation of "aesthetocompassionate man" and an "aesthetocompassionate society," the coined superword hiding the baldness of the real goal: that we rearrange our surroundings in a way that will give us not only more artists but more artists in a just society.

Out of their philosophical context, the models of the arcologies simply scare most people. When the unholy scale of the things was explained to a seven-year-old girl at the Chicago stop of the major Soleri exhibition that's been touring this country and Canada for the past three years, she burst into tears. The models look, people say, like sets for a big-budget production of 1984.

Soleri will have an easier time convincing the world that his structures are the crucial next step in man's amplification of his humanity as the bright young designers in residence at Cosanti do more details of interior spaces for Arcosanti, something that they got down to in earnest this past winter. Clearly, Soleri will approve only those designs that possess the cavelike warmth and vaulted spaciousness of the buildings at Cosanti. Dimensions for the living units in a typical arcology are usually given as 20 feet high by 40 feet wide by 60 feet deep--"enough room," as writer Richard Register has observed, "to build two floors, move in earth and start a good-sized garden."

Most important, as such details come off the drawing boards, we'll finally get a look at Soleri's ideas for the public places in his arcologies. Cities' open areas--Rio's Copacabana, the Boston Public Gardens, the Champs Elysées in Paris--give them whatever character they have, and the corresponding parts of the arcologies promise to be wondrous. Imagine a ride on a curving, 30-story escalator suspended or cantilevered into the center of an arcology: rising in minutes through a commercial center, then a terraced layer of playing fields, theaters and auditoriums, now a zoo, above it the city senate--all of them festooned with footbridges and elevators and hung in great shafts of light. For the more fantastic cities, the setting would determine the spirit of the place: The arcology called Stonebow is intended to span a canyon, where the successive geological, fossil and floral layers would "remind man of the miracle of life emerging and perpetuating itself in endless ways." Soleri's Arcoindian cities would be cut into great gashes in cliff faces; life would take place in a vast amphitheater facing the desert or the sea under a broad semidome of sky. Novanoah I is intended to float free on the seas, harvesting them in the pursuit of "an all-new and fantastic culture, adding new folds to the human condition."

But what if there's a power failure--or an earthquake or an enemy attack? And won't the arcologies be noisy as Bedlam? Certainly with each miniaturization they would become more vulnerable to breakdown from failed generators, from acts of God--and of the Kremlin or Peking, if one's thinking runs that way. But presumably they'd be built away from earth faults (and in fact would be more stable than slender high-rises). Because they'd be planned from scratch, they'd have at least as much fire resistance and backup power capability as Manhattan has. And they'd be roughly as susceptible to attack as Manhattan is--indeed, as any city is.

All the larger arcologies include plans for airstrips or landing pads on their peripheries, and--the noise of the planes aside--it seems obvious that the guts and workings of the structures would make them hum, as high-rise buildings do. Soleri has confidence that existing and expectable technology can guarantee silence in the private and even the public places of the megabuildings: He refers to the arcaded shopping centers of the Phoenix area as examples of successful sound engineering. These enclosed, colonnaded malls are eerily quiet even when milling with people--"almost too quiet," Soleri says, "for the Latin temperament."

But if noise can be shut out, people can't, and this is the heart of the matter. The actual density in the arcologies is somewhat lower than first appearances suggest, but clearly the essence of the arcological idea is a commitment to living in close, continuous contact with others. It may call for a greater change than any of us is capable of or will ever want to attempt. The first use of real wealth today is the purchase of privacy--in the form of a 30-acre farm in exurbia or a roomy penthouse fortified against strangers by location, guards and remote-control television. If a man who lives in an apartment at the top of Chicago's towering, multipurpose John Hancock Center wants to work at midnight in his office 20 floors below, he rides down to the lobby, like a Bantu shows a pass to a guard, and then boards another elevator for the ride up to the office. He does so willingly, knowing that the procedure keeps the real Bantus from his sanctuaries.

If we delight in the company of our own children and tolerate the presence of our parents, we surely don't surround ourselves with other people's children, other people's old folks. But Soleri remembers Turin, where all the citizens were "part of a cultural and social system that was giving them something of substance." He writes: "The playground [in today's city] is the act of condescending to playfulness in a habitat where grimness, ugliness and danger are endemic and offer the last measure of unconcern in an adult world gone sour. The playground is segregative. The absence of children in the so-called respectable public places is disheartening. The child has reason to become irresponsible and destructive, caged, as he is, away from the 'other world.' Arcology is an 'environmental toy.' As a miniaturized universe it offers unending elements for surprise and stimulation. There will not be fenced-in playgrounds. The whole city is the place where the child is acting out the learning process, one aspect of which is play."

And on old people: "One of the ravages of 'mobility,' or at least directly accountable to it, is the institutionalized ghetto for the elderly. Following the generalized scattering of things and thoughts, the family has broken down into four main fragments: the young, the parents, the grandparents and the anonymous relative. Aging being common to all (the lucky ones), all will have a taste of the tragic segregation of the aged; the insurance company and social security will not do, lest man become or remain marketable goods. The implications of 'arcological life' are the most favorable for reintegration of the different age groups and thus for the knitting of family strands."

Soleri's intention, then, is nothing less than the destruction of the alienation we feel not only from the underclasses in our cities but from our parents and acquaintances. The project may be hopeless. It may even be undesirable. (One can at least entertain the idea that we should all become more isolated, more mute.) But if life is truly in the thick of things--if contact with others, and the care for them that follows contact, is the stuff of life--then arcology, if only as an experiment, is desirable. And the way Arcosanti is taking shape suggests that, at least on a small scale, the undertaking may be feasible.

• • •

Three days after he met with the apprentices at the swimming pool--this still at the beginning of last summer, Arcosanti's first full building season--Soleri joined them at the site. It's in ranching country, high desert halfway between Phoenix and Flagstaff. When Arcosanti is built, it will straddle a modest-sized mesa that looks down onto a plain traversed by the gulch of the Agua Fria River. You come over the lip of the mesa to get to the work camp below it, at the edge of the riverbank, and the sight is quintessentially Western: The earth is suede gray, mottled with chaparral and cacti. Ash and cottonwoods stand along the banks of the branch, their tops hugely round and kelly green in the sunlight, forest green in the broad angled shadow of the butte.

"It's going to be right on the edge of that mesa," a goofy, insurrectionary staffer named Jerry O'Shaughnessey said, "and it'll look down into this valley, so everyone can sit up there and get stoned and say how beautiful it is." He paused, grinned. "We can all look at the cracks in the cement."

"Why will the cement crack?"

"Because everything Soleri does has cracks in it. It's his touch. It's the Italian touch."

One of the girls from the new group had discovered she couldn't make it without her boyfriend and headed back to the East Coast, but the rest were flushed with sunburns and work. The mesa itself had been surveyed and there'd been some surface excavation, but last summer the main construction was to be at the workers' camp, which won't be attached to the main structure. The kids had been pouring and smoothing concrete in modular slabs that were lifted and fitted together to make cubes with big circular holes in the walls; some of them slept in the cubes, some in a long wooden dormitory. When Arcosanti is built, this area might become a playground. Already someone had hung a 40-foot Tarzan's rope from one of the tall cottonwoods overhanging the gully.

On his arrival, Soleri ran into a problem: A volunteer had spent the morning laying out a 20' x 60' vegetable garden in a plot at the edge of the riverbank. On close inspection, Soleri determined that the land sloped in the direction of the tilled rows, although the tilt was nearly impossible to see, less than a couple of degrees. Soleri insisted that the rows be laid out in the other direction, to follow what amounted to an imagined contour of the land, despite the young man's protest that with the intensive French horticulture he'd planned for the garden, even a visible contour wouldn't matter. Soleri would have none of it, for the first time in four days exhibiting an unbending willfulness.

He seemed more himself later in the day, when he led his manual laborers on a trek up the river bed. He'd bought 860 acres of this land from a rancher, with a lease on an additional 3200 acres, and wanted to show the heart of it to his apprentices. The banks of the gulch the Agua Fria has cut rise 30 feet and the trees add another 30 or 40 feet to that. The group walked along the shaded, spacious tunnel of the bottom. (Soleri had hoped to use this river silt as the base for Arcosanti's concrete, but experimentation finally convinced him that he'd have to import standard sand--part of the explanation for O'Shaughnessey's cracks.) Early in the walk, he bent to show the youngsters the water cress that grows in the stream and suggested that one of them come down every day to gather it for their kitchen. Farther along, he stopped to let the straggle catch up with him and pointed above his head to the spot where Arcosanti will rise. He stopped again to indicate the general location of the ranch buildings--which he urged the apprentices not to approach. "They're very nice people," he said. "But they don't like to be bothered."

There was an archetypal fat boy in the group: Lord of the Flies' Piggy grown older, pudgier and more nearsighted. In several places, the stream broadened and swung close to a bank, so the file had to leap it or clamber a few feet up the steep, crumbly bank. Heads turned to see if the quiet misfit bringing up the rear would be able to make the jump. Nobody was actively helping him yet--this was only the fourth day they'd been together and his forlorn, stoic expression discouraged it. But heads did turn, concern for him was in the air, and a girl trailed with him--not aligned with him, her expression said, but just as obviously there, ready for him if he fell.

The field trip reached its destination at a stand of smooth boulders near the head of the property. The group climbed onto the broadest rock in the midafternoon sun for another question-and-answer session, this one preceded by a loving, rambling dissertation by Soleri on the land they'd just explored. He told them of the antelope he'd seen on it, insisted on the value of the French Charolais cattle that graze it, apologized for the fact that the rancher has to set poison out for coyotes. He said that he wants to keep the canyon untouched but in fact envisions a service road and pathways cutting through it and suggested that eventually he might want to carve sculpture in the rocky walls. His eyes lit when he described finding the site after years of casual looking in the general area: "It has everything--water, accessibility, power. And variety to the land: We have both a top and a bottom, and shade and rock formations. You can really play with it quite a bit."

The first question was from O'Shaughnessey, who last summer was vaguely in charge of integrating the summer workshop groups into the program designed by Soleri and his few permanent staff members: He asked where you catch the bus out. Soleri went along with the laughter and at the same time got across the information that the road connecting Phoenix and Flagstaff was less than a mile away and that a bus stopped at Cordes Junction.

In the course of a discussion about the milk that the camp cook bought from a nearby private school, a girl got Soleri's attention and asked, "Why don't we buy a cow?"

"Yes, why don't you?" Soleri said. A boy volunteered to go out and round up some cows and Soleri said, "Well, you better talk to them first, because they may not know about milk."

More than half this group had come from schools in New York. "I wouldn't know the milking cows from the non-milking ones," the boy said.

"Well, the first thing to know," Soleri said, "is that it doesn't come from the horns."

Most of the serious questions were about money. After two days of pouring concrete, the young workers had suddenly become obsessed with the discovery that the project they were working on was underfinanced. The foundation is strained to the bottom of its resources by the purchase of the land. Soleri got a used crane for $7500 last year, and there are several salaries to be paid. After the land is paid for, he told them, they might be able to hire a professional who really knows concrete, or a carpenter. He talked about the possibility of getting retired craftsmen to help. But the kids were thinking in terms of major infusions of cash and wondered out loud why the project hadn't gotten support from the big foundations, business or the Government.

Soleri explained that he has no fund raiser because he doesn't have the funds to pay for one. He talked with some bitterness about the developers--there was a group from Dallas that he remembers especially well--that come, and look, and come back and look again, and say they're going to commission or support a major undertaking and then are never heard from again. Finally, he said: "We built Earth House, the first building in Cosanti, in 1956. Every summer since then, production has doubled. The choice was not to build Arcosanti at all or to build it the way we are building it. I could wait until all the millions are flying in or we can go to work now."

Less than five miles away, a Phoenix developer is putting up a patch of conventional second homes, which Soleri is delighted to have so close to Arcosanti as a measure of the value of his vision. He also thinks the current work at Arcosanti will present the Federal Government with an urban alternative in which the experimental stage has already been completed. But he treated the youngsters' continued insistence on the desirability of a few bulldozers romantically and imperiously. "You shouldn't worry so much about how it will be built," he said. "When they wanted to build a great monastery four hundred years ago, they didn't have machines. They did it with the love and skills of the laborers."

Meanwhile, down in Houston, plans were proceeding for something called the Houston Center, ground for which was broken in January 1972. The center will cover 74 acres in the heart of the city with office towers, hotels, stores and apartment buildings. One guess at the final cost of the project to its developers is one and a half billion dollars. William L. Pereira Associates, the Los Angeles firm that planned it, has separated pedestrian and vehicular traffic, and its low-rise elements suggest an Aztec city. But the 15 towers--slabs and cylinders--that soar out of the life below are vertical filing cabinets. Among the best of the new towns being planned for the desert outside Phoenix is one called Fountain Hills, the principal attraction of which is a plume of white water shooting almost 100 feet higher into the sky than the top of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Sitting on the boulders with Soleri and his wife and the mix of lost youngsters and tough, accomplished ones he attracts, with thoughts of the other projects in mind--the cautiousness of the designs, the hedged wordings in the hundreds of contracts involved, the spirit in which the laborers work--cynicism about Soleri's naiveté began to seem cheap. If some of the billions of dollars that will be spent on urban experiments in this country in the next couple of decades doesn't flow to Soleri, it will mean that the system determining who gets cash for major undertakings in this society is failing. Funding Soleri surely won't be easy--no matter who does it, there'll be a furious tension between the sponsor and the artist, who hasn't had to answer to anyone but himself through most of his working life. Soleri and Colly will keep the fat kid on the project in one capacity or another, and it's hard to imagine a sponsor standing for that expense. But for all the reasons that can be symbolized by the fact that he will keep the fat kid with him, it's time for Soleri's coherent vision to meet the test that adequate financing would provide.

The group had been on the rock for 45 minutes now, and O'Shaughnessey made another joke about the availability of the bus. There was some confusion about which company made the run, and Soleri leaned over as if to touch his ear to the ground. "To tell the difference between a Trailways and a Greyhound," he said, "that takes a real Indian."

• • •

Soleri was one of the last off the boulders as the session broke up, and he called down to a clutch of youngsters, urging them to leave the river bottom but not to cross the g.ounds near the ranch buildings. They couldn't understand him--in part because of his accent, in part because he knew east from west and they didn't--and one boy in particular kept asking if he was supposed to stay to the left or the right. Finally, Colly said, "He doesn't understand a word you said, Paolo," and Soleri thought he recognized the missing key: "Yes, well," he said, turning to beam down at the boy, who looked like Prince Valiant, "Stay to the east, man."

Not the least of the paradoxes about Soleri is the fact of his dependence on the anti-authoritarian, usually anti-city counterculture. The kids not only come and pay him to work for him each summer, they return to school, many of them, and proselytize for his ideas in situations where, increasingly, what the students want to study is what will damned well be taught. In return, Soleri gives them a chance to pick up some construction skills for the cost of approximately three weeks of conventional school and a communal experience in the service of an idea, whether or not they understand the implications of that idea. "I don't know exactly why I'm here," said a young man who had just dropped out of his third year in engineering at George Washington University. "I'm certainly not going to see anything of any dimensions built. But it seems like a good cause, and there aren't that many good causes around."

For all of Soleri's pretensions to Wrightian masterfulness, the atmosphere at both of his work sites is loose and long-haired. Very early in the morning, especially on weekends, when Soleri is most likely to be working alone, the loudspeakers at Cosanti carry a variety of classical music. Later in the day, that gives way to The Rolling Stones, or Steve Stills, or the album of the month. One night last spring, in one of the earth houses the apprentices had camped in, a pot of spaghetti cooking on the stove and Tom Rush on a portable KLH and the indigo sky in low arched windows made a mood you could drown in. And Arcosanti is a cross between a summer camp in God's country and a commune, complete last summer with a boy who saluted the sunset upside down, standing on his head for half an hour.

Most important, the experience includes face-to-face contact with the kind of master-teacher we only occasionally produce. Before the walk up the canyon, Soleri sat the group down at the two long tables where they were to eat for the next six weeks and spelled out a few more operating rules. A gentle landlord, he asked that they not paint the concrete but encouraged them to do any other decorating they wished with the inside walls of their cubes. "After a while," he said, "the abandoned, the careless, gets on everybody's nerves. So you might have a wild idea. Fine. But demonstrate that that wild idea is cared for--that you are really interested in doing it, and are not going to abandon it."

Soleri is an innocent. He doesn't know how to approach the foundations for grants, or clients for commissions. His ideas are wilder than the countryside he's adopted and the fantasies of the youngsters he attracts. But he cares for them with a passion, and they assuredly will not be abandoned.

• • •

Through the rest of last summer and, with smaller crews, on through the winter, he accomplished much more at Arcosanti than a skeptical visitor had thought possible. Except for finishing touches, the work camp is now complete. It includes a spacious octagonal meetinghouse, a geodesic dome that has been used as a carpentry shop and this summer will be converted into a dormitory, and its final complement of 24 cubes. More important, the first small pieces of Arcosanti itself have been set into the mesa. By this fall, the structure will house a concrete casting plant, a ceramics workshop and a foundry, as well as a few living areas and possibly a swimming pool. (It's desert, after all, and Soleri wants to build without air conditioning.) He no longer talks about hiring more professionals: There are five architects and an engineer on the salaried staff, and he feels that he's developing a steady supply of competent craftsmen in the workshops.

Standing in Arcosanti's rough concrete foundation, on the edge of the empty Arizona sky, the visitor this spring remembered the walk back to the camp from the boulders. Then it was Soleri who lagged. He stopped to scoop up a sheet of heavy plastic that had blown down into the gulch from the camp--and filled the other hand with bunch after bunch of water cress. The visitor realized for the first time that, if it takes 20 years, Arcosanti will be built, with or without the foundations. And even if the millions do start flowing in, Soleri will continue to police and harvest the Agua Fria, teaching a generation that there are things to be built, and ways to build them, that will outlast even the concrete dream.