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About ArcologyCentral

ArcologyCentral is for all those who may be interested in sustainable arcological design. But if you have ever worked in any capacity at Cosanti or Arcosanti, if you completed a construction workshop or seminar week, if you were an Arcosanti Elderhosteler, then (I hope) ArcologyCentral will be another gateway for you to get together with (or reconnect with) many other people who also "went there, did that."  

The mission of ArcologyCentral is to foster and promote research that can initiate and/or apply implementation of sustainable arcological design  to new (or old) projects, to real world problems large or small, to situational challenges or concerns. 

ArcologyCentral.net is not authorized by Arcosanti or  the Cosanti Foundation. It is simply a personal cyber-handshake to all those who may embrace the dream of an "urban laboratory."

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About me

   I'm called "Claire" or "Clara," "RC" or 







































"RuthClaire," my given name.
   I was 18 years old in 1962 when I tumbled into the studios of Paolo Soleri in Paradise Valley.
   My plan was simple. I was going to stop in, have a brief "hello/goodbye" visit with my friend Cuyler, who'd left off studying architecture at Cornell in upstate NY to work with Paolo, and then be on my way. 
     Mann plannt und Gott lacht (Man plans and God laughs), my grandmother would have said.
     It was early morning and the summer sun was already bright as we drove onto then-unpaved Doubletree Ranch Road. In front of 6433, a one-story frame house, I spotted my friend in a small group doing modern dance exercises. He stopped when he saw us, greeted me, introduced me to Colly Soleri, who invited us to join them. My shy cousin Clark, who’d been driving, hung back; but Debbie, my travel-partner from NY who'd come out to San Francisco to find me at the behest of our mutual friend YCharles Ludlam (the "Y" is silent, he'd said), stepped right in with me. Sally, the teacher, gave  us a few more new combinations to try before she had to leave. More introductions: Paolo, Colly, Kristine and Daniela Soleri; Sally; Alan Saret, a NY artist. Then, Cuyler offered to lead me to a glass of water.  
     Ha! I'd have followed him to Tibet for water but he simply walked ahead of me down a slight slope, beyond which I found myself in the most habitable space I'd ever, in my entire life, been in.  I could not have imagined it kinesthetically from the slides he'd shown me at my apartment on West 83rd Street in NYC the year before; his photos, interesting as they'd been, had scarcely prepared me for the real thing. Might as well have been a creature of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth who’d wandered away from the comforts and security of the hobbit-hole and could scarcely believe "home" was still there after the journey's travails.   The gentle whispers of bells, hanging everywhere in the all-but-invisible-from-the-road atelier, clinked harmonious welcome.

     Relatively untutored in architecture, I  marveled at the absolute creatureliness of the place. I sensed, rather than discerned the complexity of its deceptively simple design, the  ingenuity of its execution. Its architectural vocabulary was unusual for suburban Phoenix but it made complete sense environmentally and graphically, was just as right economically, made perfect ergonomic sense of a landscape containing intricate nuances the complexities of which did not immediately present themselves; at least not to me.   
     I've been a long-term, many-times returnee ever since. I watch it with genuine curiosity. Now, I'm turning thought into deed by building a cyber-forum into which others interested in arcology and matters arcological may venture. 
     Welcome to my experiment! 
    

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Deb & Claire finishing a bridge model at Cosanti in 1962