“Now I wanna think about all the good times,” muses Charli XCX on the remix to So I, one of the most heartfelt tracks off her Brat album and an ode to her late friend, the DJ and producer Sophie. “Best night ever in Arcosanti,” she purrs. “Got birthday cake on the way.” My bovine brain assumed Arcosanti was a restaurant in West Hollywood, but a quick Google reveals something else entirely. It turns out Arcosanti is an experimental city in the high desert of Arizona, designed by the architect Paolo Soleri. If there’s one Brat collab no one saw coming, it’s this.
Arcosanti, a small outpost on a mesa 70 miles north of Phoenix, in Yavapai County, is a popular tourist destination in the United States, with daily tours and 35,000 visitors each year. A quick sample of fellow journalists at The London Standard office, though, suggests it’s little known outside its country of origin. And, indeed, outside of urban planning circles.
The story of Arcosanti dates back to 1970, though its premise feels decidedly more current. With his utopian citadel, Soleri sought to demonstrate how urban conditions could be improved while minimising the destructive impact of infrastructure on the planet. It is one of the earliest, purpose-built eco-cities, powered by wind and sun. For the concrete panels that make up much of its architectural foundations, Soleri used materials acquired from the surrounding area, like silt.
The result is a traffic-free community immune to sprawl (”urban implosion, rather than urban explosion,” Soleri once said) and a cornucopia of geometric structures akin to a James Bond movie (Roger Moore era, obviously). Tall towers, grand arches and flowing buttresses that swoop and wobble across the desert landscape: it’s almost as if The Barbican and an abandoned spaceship had a lovechild, and certainly the kind of place where Charli and Sophie might have dined out on the trip of a lifetime. (Although editorial convention compels me to clarify that Charli was, in fact, there for a concert back in 2019.)
Soleri called the concept underpinning Arcosanti “arcology”, a portmanteau of architecture and – you guessed it – ecology. Soleri was a disciple of the architect and designer Frank Lloyd Wright, a pioneer of what came to be known as the Prairie School movement: a style typified by horizontal lines, hipped roofs and windows grouped into horizontal bands, all with the simple goal of blending into the landscape. Arcosanti took this a step further by harnessing the power of nature to its advantage; most buildings are oriented southward to capture the sun's light and heat, while roof designs admit the maximal amount of sunlight in the winter and a minimal amount during the summer.
As far as inhabitants go, Arcosanti was conceived as something close to a commune: the New York Times once likened it to a Kibbutz. It was “designed with the belief that by cramming tens of thousands of people together, they would “evolve” and crime would disappear,” Wired once wrote. 7,000 people have lived there at some point or other since its inception, though never more than 150 at a time. Many of them were students and volunteers, there to learn about arcology and contribute to the development of what is, at its core, a model village.
On Arcosanti’s inability to graduate to real city status (Soleri’s original plan was to create a city housing 5,000 people), Wired wrote: “Unlike New Delhi, Arcosanti was too rigid of a structure ... to contain the full spectrum of people a city needs to survive; not just high priests and acolytes, but entrepreneurs and rogues too.”
Eight years ago, Arcosanti was described by the Guardian as being only three percent complete. As it stands, only thirteen structures have been built – including a swimming pool. Much of this is due to lack of funding, although it’s worth noting Arcosanti runs a somewhat successful bronze casting business, which serves as the financial backbone of the operation. Nowadays, there are 60-odd residents, joined by a small but steady trickle of fans and students taking part in five-week workshops where they help to build additional structures. Slowly, but surely.
Arcosanti is, in some ways, a failure: a city languishing in perpetual incompletion. But that is also part of its charm. Ultimately, it stands less as an achievement than as a symbol. Some might call it an icon of architectural narcissism: the navel-gazing, megalomaniac tendency espoused by Soleri and predecessors like Le Corbusier, to bulldoze historic neighbourhoods and leave a trail of highways and asteroid-like buildings in their wake. But the less intransigent viewer might see it, instead, as a prescient and noble attempt to address the very climate crisis that has come to envelop us. In many ways, that makes it very Brat.
