I'm just going to babble here for a while, due to my reflective mood, remembering Colly and Paolo together. As "Mom and Pop" operations go, theirs was a successful one but let no-one ignore the fact that without Mom, Pop quite simply would not have gotten done what he did. 

Having personally witnessed decades of talk around the "problem" of community at Arcosanti, I found recent social media postings repeating tired (IMO also inanely trite) criticisms, prejudiced cliches full of learned helplessness bordering on self-pity, all of them replete with misconceptions. I was bemused as well as fretful, having been major preoccupied with getting my application to grad school submitted by mid-January. Deadline environments produce Murphy's Law environments in which near everything that could possibly complicate or go wrong, does just that. Retaining a sense of humour is of grave practical advantage when it comes to organizing matters of an administrative hue, since bureaucracies challenge, no matter what their form. Confucius trumps Lao Tzu; Gruen, Doxiadis. and a militarily purposed US interstate national highway system trump Soleri's idea of arcology and high-speed mass transit. 

Those are matters of historical record but I am optimist enough to want to work towards rectification as well as perfection of talent. No way, Jose, do I want to bother taking out a contract on all the people who willy-nilly insist on spending every waking minute getting in the way of my helpless laughter at how absurd the world has become. Even if I personally would rather the world get to experience how much better off it would be without the mania of that particular form of greed. 

We're three minutes to midnight on the Atomic Clock yet plastic jettisoned into ocean waters isn't a capital offence? What kind of whack jobs allow that? Gutting the lifeblood of the planet - 3/4 of earth's surface is ocean, remember? - with poison is: Ho-hum, What the hey, Who cares, nothing new? Business as usual?

I ain't buyin' - why should I?  Why should anyone? Genocide ain't my cuppa. Ain't even my preferred form of poison. Dunno what is optimum, but I can say right off the bat  (pun almost intended) I'm not into battering, either. Was never fine at it, so why start now? 

I do 'get' sword fighting - did some fencing, back in the day. Dunno whether I could get serious about charging out now, epee in hand, quick enough to coax my combat stances to work, even for stage play. 

Coz if Life as Stage Play takes sophistication, let me be clear about one thing: if I've acquired any, it was got the hard way.

'Style of Class' (John Coltrane's phrase) was coined to relate race as an issue; but in my class, that style dictates it isn't the severity of the beating that matters. Beating is wrong. Period, It's Wrong, and beaters get arrested. That's how  white kids in our town were taught, at least in the neighborhoods around the RR tracks, where I grew up. 


'Style of class' in my immediate surrounds also meant fathers did not invite aggressive contact with their daughters, nor did it account for the surprise discovery that some of the girls I grew up with, went to school with, hung out with after school, had fathers or brothers or other family members who were inappropriate with them despite maternal attention, maternal devotion, intelligent maternal thinking; despite also paternal diligence, paternal concern, paternal hopes and dreams. 

Live in hope, you never outgrow your need to live in hope. Life is pleasantly more simple if your Rx for it includes applying bits of hope to all wounds. Thanks again for that box, Pandora, 

I'm rambling on about this because I'm trying to catch my bearings, I didn't find myself in the middle of vertigo so it's not that kind of - oops this is a really big change - shift in outlook or focus that causes dizziness. But it's serious enough to warrant a pause to consider, to look for clues as to why I'm doing what I'm doing. I know where I am and I'm grateful for that because I can identify and appreciate the space around me. But I'll bet that is just a starting point.

Where I was going with this is: Debate about Arcosanti's "community" put me in mind of Mr. Rogers. Mr. R did not live in my local world but I like to think he might have wanted to visit, that he'd have liked to taste the neighborliness I myself experience now in the geographically isolated region I've been lodging in while old dog I focuses on learning some new tricks. Easier to do, perhaps, in an ecosystem relatively distant from the globally rampant chronic ugliness on continuous broadcast via predigested telly news.

No assassins, no baby-snatchers. Minimal vandalism. If bad news strikes, it's usually along the lines of garbage-marauding bear, rabbit-attacking bobcat, excessive pileup of snow. Occasional highway accident. A recent one ended the life of an elderly friend. But for the most part, live and learn - is my impression of how people here progress. 

Winter is also progressing. An email said come meditate Wednesday@7, Ani Pema Chodron will talk (on tape), remind us how presently to be more present. I put this on my agenda, Yes I did. Good way to bring a calming end to a busy day, stimulate the tranquillity/insight trade route my brain needs on a regular basis for my mind to behave more mindfully. Put order in my chaos, help me process procedurally. Makes me feel quite rich...

Like Dragon Boat paddlers synchronize the strokes to maintain water-motion rhythm like a string ensemble's perfect intonation and precise bowing, my brain gets to observe my zany monkey-mind that's somehow coordinating a gazillion transit routes all going at the same time. 

Following one thought-train, I recently contacted Peter Block, author of Community: The Structure of Belonging, via his website (link above. just under the photo of Colly), but doing that was due to an instance of simultaneous thinking that I noticed was happening, that got me to think about thinking. 

That experience of having more than one thought at once, thinking in more than one direction at a time, reminded me of how it feels to perform, how creating a character on stage for an audience can shift the dynamic of your everyday relationship with yourself, reminding you that "life-is-performance." Good thing to learn, is my take on that. Because having been born into and raised by a performance-oriented family, the stunning theatricality of Paolo's architectural design sense blew me away when I first encountered Cosanti. Those structures made "All the world's a stage" profoundly more real, more true. Paolo, whose background was quite different from mine, was mystified by my repeated insistence that theatre was all-important, fundamentally important, but I like to think my ranting helped him say Yes when Charles Loloma and Lloyd Kiva New asked him to accept a commission to design and construct an amphitheater for the IAIA in Santa Fe, NM. But we're still not even close to seeing the program it was intended to house, deeply entrenched in Native consciousness. Why is that? Could it possibly have something to do with - a disconnect between what we say or believe arcology is supposed to accomplish, as the embodiment of how to promote common good ideas like universal accessibility, and what we actually DO to make sure they get their full 'day in the sun'??

Just hypothetically, now, how about let's make a list of values we believe go hand-in-hand with development of arcology; then let's define those values. It's still a rhetorical question, of course, because we know we're nowhere near the point of being able to carry out construction - we have a few tools, a nice chunk of land, a few hardy souls scrabbling dirt and dreams, jugglers of conflicting visions, contradictory loyalties, empires of frugality, consensus as a conceptual ground rule, commitment to - what? 

Here's an idea, although it comes from what Paolo (no student of social development history) imagined was the antithesis of arcology: 

                  "To live content with small means; 
to seek elegance rather than luxury; 
refinement rather than fashion; 
to be worthy, not respectable; 
wealthy, not rich; 
to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; 
to listen to the stars and birds, to babes and sages; 
to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never. 
In a word, 
to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common....
This is my symphony, 
[to live in our small town]."  
(William Ellery Channing, American moralist, Unitarian Clergyman and Author, 1780-1842)

For quite some while I've wanted to objectify my own understanding of Arcosanti as the place that set out to demonstrate arcology as a concept. The best way to do that, I felt, was to find out a whole lot more about the people who've contributed to its construction. Dr. Mel Roman, professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in NYC and a Cosanti Foundation Trustee, agreed it was 'a book waiting to be written' but we got no further with it than cobbling together a book proposal before his death. We're years later now; Mel is long passed on, time flies... 

Flies when you're having fun, flies even if  you're not; but here we are, the idea still holds with conviction on my part that questions are needed. Inspired by The Brunner Family Foundation, to which I was introduced by the Center for Architecture in NYC, I want to carry out a study of workshop participants who were, at the time of their experience of Arcosanti, enrolled in professional schools of architecture. The project goal is to obtain a more structured understanding and through more information about what interconnections between 'the professional and the personal' look like, in the field of architectural education. 

The instrumental means of learning more about what those connections might be, is to hunker down on an investigation of those Arcosanti Builders' experience of Arcosanti itself. Examine their experience of that 'built-environment education' 'place-in-progress' called Arcosanti so we can learn more about the impact, professionally and personally, of the idea of arcology. 

Backtracking for a moment, though, to the label "urban laboratory" that was bestowed by NYTimes architecture critic Ada Louse Huxtable ("The most important experiment of our time," said she);  I can't help but be reminded, as ASU Architecture Professor Jeff Cook once drily pointed out, that even by 1997, nearly 30 years after ground was first broken at Arcosanti, it had not been made precisely clear just what tests were being conducted. Pretty serious oversight. Since then, what had been a dilemma has remained a dilemma. 

It not being a fixed rule at what point a dilemma becomes an incredible obstacle, if we remain too busy to figure out what the tipping point is. we might never get to see the end of "what might have been;" therefore what I'm wondering is: How do we refocus, what's the best course of action? What's the Plan, Man? 

Arconauts (and others) have talked about, around, over and under, witnessed and squabbled over what needs to be done. The word "community" is uttered again and again. The mental exercise required for that, in and of itself, Paolo thought endangered Arcosanti; so he wasn't supportive.  For decades. But so what if he wasn't? Why let imperfection of understanding get in the way of working deliberately towards improving communication? 

I took a mental step back, far enough to get hit with a brainwave hard enough to make me reel. I'm of the school that says nice recovery is the only desirable option when you get hit by anything, no matter how hard, so I opted for that. I'm applying to grad school, re-exploring the cooperative movement, looking to carry out a research project that can focus on the structural foundation of Ar/Cosanti in the most literal way I can think of, which is its educational intention. 

As the project of an educational non-profit, Arcosanti by definition must be a place to learn. Limiting myself, for the moment, to just that, I'd like to find out things like how that label of "urban laboratory" has been interpreted by its builders. What have they figured is being tested? What has it meant to them to have involved themselves in that 'laboratory'?  How has it and/or hasn't their participation affected them?

I've wondered about this for some time; I admit; Now it's time to forge ahead because I've got an idea about contextualizing those questions and related ones. Logic dictates starting with the architecture-savvy, People who were enrolled as students in professional schools of architecture when they came.  Identify groups of those individuals stratified by decade starting with Siltpile (1963). Analyse the data-base so we can get a grip on how our numbers are distributed, Data analysis has to start with that, to identify those who were architecture students when they came into the workshop program. From there, refine for record-keeping convenience that can be very carefully managed for evidence-collection suitable for gathering sensitive information. Because everyone's story deserves respect, we need to establish a base-line for story-keeping that will be in compliance with mandated clinical document-management standards at the highest level of privacy protection. The research I'm envisioning is bound to unearth a lot of personal information, everyone participating has to have a guarantee that personal information stays  personal. (I'm sensitive here because I've not became an architect, despite my interest in the built environment, I've become a Social Worker, a profession that is all about respecting people and as the remarkable philosopher Ian Hacking once said, back in the days I was lucky enough to have been his student at UBC, "One cannot be too much a respecter of persons." )  

Categories of people to interview, because an exhaustive study of a construction crew scattered over time, geographically and culturally diverse in every way, is a large project, and for simplicity's sake, has to be minimalized: 
     (1) Individuals who received academic credit from a school of architecture for their workshop experience; 
     (2) Individuals who were architecture students before workshop experience but didn't look for or receive academic credit; 
     (3) Individuals whose studies were outside architecture at the time of their workshop.

Questions I want the study to include are: 
     I. Personal History (Who am I type-stuff)
            A) What's been the effect of it, educationally, in your life? 
            B) How do you interpret your experience there? 
            C) Through what sort of lenses have you viewed it and your experience of it? 
     II. Ar/Cosanti Experience
            A) Did you have expectations?
            B) What did you do while you were there?
            C) How did you get there?
     III. What came after that?
            A) Did the experience make any difference in your life?
            B) If so, what? 
            C) Open-ended: What more about it and yourself do you want to say, to share?

I have some ideas about how this study can be illustrated (as Lewis Carroll put it, in Alice in Wonderland: "Of what use is a book" ... "without pictures or conversations?") but before I jump that gun (or over any other hurdle, for that matter) I would love to know if my idea has resonance with other arconauts.