Hannah’s first blog. This may relate indirectly to the course material, but I thought you may find it interesting. I had the opportunity of visiting Arcosanti in Arizona over the holidays. It is a social housing project, developed by Paulo Soleri in the 70’s. His philosophy is to combine architecture and ecology in what he terms “arcology”, with a goal to lessen our destructive impact on the earth. You can become part of the project, and help to develop the sustainable city, by volunteering through construction, design, planning or ceramics, and in return food and accomodation is provided. They recycle old car parts and use them in their construction in creative ways. The types of technology that are implemented are simple yet effective. Also they grow their own food, and the economy is based primarily on the selling of wind bells. Paulo Soleri seemed to be ahead of his time, and this is perhaps one solution to urban sprawl, but why hasn’t it gained as much popularity as one might expect? Check out the website:
Do they try to recycle any computer parts? How do they feel about personal computers in general (other than having a website)?
Interesting stuff Hannah. The first time I heard of an arcology was playing the computer game SimCity2000 (which i used to play all the time). In the game, the user plans and builds cities and one of the options is to create giant high-density residential complexes called “arcologies.” There are various sizes and shapes of arcologies in the game but they are all large, futuristic-looking vertical structures that house thousands of people. I always loved building arcologies in my cities because they seemed like such a smart way to house lots of people. The arcologies in SimCity2000 were loosely based on Soleri’s ideas and helped to make this term part of mainstream urban planning jargon.
I’m not sure how they feel about computers in general…I did notice, however, that they recycled old computer chips and used them in their tile-making, embedding the chips into the tiles, and the tiles were then used as stepping stones around different sites.
The SimCity arcologies were also the first thing to come to mind for me. One of the downsides to building them was always that providing I wasn’t using ‘cheats’ to give myself money, I always found it difficult to finance the cleaner ‘advanced’ arcologies, and would instead usually have to buy the ugly arco that looked like a factory early on.
Do you know if the Arcology you vistited is self sustaining? The building certainly looks interesting, and certainly lends some credence to the concept. But I looked through the site, but the only reference to financing was the selling of the bells, or through donations from what I’m assuming are outside sources. I wonder how they got the ball rolling so to speak.