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Paolo Soleri: In wanting to learn, in one's family, in working, some sort of association, of partnerships or whatever, but never, never, never a commune. Commune is a very good exercise for young people for a few weeks or a few months but as a way of life, it's total nonsense. A lack of self-discipline, of self-responsibility, of knowledge, of experience. It makes for a catastrophe. EGG: Where does your architectural philosophy -- arcology -- come from? PS: The label is adjusted from architecture and ecology, so it's just a label, nothing mystical about it. And it suggests that since we come from the ecology, from the biosphere, we might as well keep that in mind and try to coordinate with it, instead of fighting it. What are the examples telling us (besides the examples developed by ourselves through civilization and culture and so on)? There's the example, which is much older, which is the organism and how the organisms organize themselves. In a way, an organism is an urban effect in the sense that it is so complex and so self-contained and so efficient, but we better try to learn something about it. Yesterday I saw a little quotation from a book that I was reading where they were talking about, this scientist was talking about DNA. And if you watch the DNA that is in my body and you make it into a strand, the strand is a hundred billion miles long -- not a hundred miles, and not a hundred million. A hundred billion miles long. So that tells us that unless we are able to understand this astonishing fact, we are not really able to cope with the future, because what makes us possible is this implosion, this folding over into time which is almost invisible. This strand of information and so on. So we are highly individualized, and consequently we are very, very complex. So you transfer that to the urban condition, to the habitat, and you find out that we better think about that thing. EGG: How does this relate to suburban sprawl? PS: The main thing is that, again going back to an organism, is that segregation is deadly. You cannot take the lungs and put them over there, and take the liver and throw it in there. You have to invest all those organs and those functions within a very small space and then you have to put an envelope around this space. And that's why we exist. Without that discipline, we do not exist. Staying with the organism, you find out that logistics are essential. We are a logistical miracle, a truly logistical miracle. And the logistics for a system that contains many organisms should try to be also pretty good. But the logistics that we have been picking out lately are very, very catastrophic. An automobile is a good example. The automobile turns out to be gigantic, turns out to be very expensive, very invasive, and very polluting. Naturally, it takes us into an urban landscape, which is a killer. EGG: Not everyone lives in an urban area. Some people like living in the woods... PS: Number one, the city is a highly complex system. To coordinate activities of hundreds, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people and to maintain a certain coherence and a certain harmony, it's very difficult. But that's what we are after, after all. So to isolate ourselves in the wilderness, even if there was enough wilderness, it doesn't make any sense. We are gregarious, we are familial, and the learning process is so much based on cooperation and actual living together. EGG: Then why do you live in the middle of the desert? PS: That's simple. In trying to come up with some kind of a prototype, an example, it might help to understand what we are trying to do. To do it in the middle of a city, it's just beyond pale. You cannot do it. The vested interests in the city are so enormous, so sharp, and so demanding that you cannot initiate something like that. EGG: What would happen if we started building cities like yours? PS: Take the automobile, again, because it's so blatantly evident. If you pull away all the network of roads and streets and parking and so on of the automobile, you have an implosion of the habitat. But ... you have to let the habitat overlap and fold over itself, so instead of being two-dimensional it becomes three-dimensional, like any organism is. That single factor of eliminating the enormous waste of roads and streets and so on implodes the habitat. And then, by folding it over, you have another implosion. That is miniaturization in action. EGG: Do you think it's possible that we would do this anyway? PS: In our development, personal and individual development, we have our parents, then we move out and get married. We buy into a larger room, then we buy into a mansion, and on and on. If we cannot contain this need for becoming bigger and bigger and having a larger and larger domain, then the whole economy has to be transformed. Because instead of needing to fill six or seven rooms, if I only have two or three rooms to fill, then my dependence on the market is cut down proportionally. So the bigger the house, the more I turn toward the market for consumption. Since we are oriented towards consumption, we think that that's where fulfillment is. Then we don't put any limit to how large our domain might want to be, our personal domain. EGG: But our cities are more complex than simple a reflection of our society. PS: Yes, I know. Because I always say that if you take Moscow and Washington, you cannot deduct by what you see that Washington is the base for the democratic society and Moscow was for a long time an autocratic society. Evidently, there is the influence because we are environmental animals by definition. We come from an environment; so the impact of the environment is very, very powerful. EGG: How do you feel about Manhattan? PS: Well, different maybe. Number one, Manhattan developed over a hundred years. So, in a sense, it's a slow development and an accumulation of many things, most of them pretty good, some of them pretty bad. And I would take Manhattan as a good example of what the city can do. I would never say, "Manhattan. Look down toward it." EGG: But you would still replace Manhattan along with the rest the country... PS: Well, that would be crazy. That's a non sequitur. Things change and evolve, so the way to change things is to influence the transformation. Not to proceed by destruction. EGG: What would happen if the currently under-developed nations of the world suddenly had the means to replicate the American Dream? PS: It would be catastrophic. Really catastrophic. I've always plugged the auto, because it's such an exact example. If we do what we are trying to do with China now, to introduce the automobile as 'it!' -- the miracle machine -- then China will have to have six hundred million automobiles. One car for two persons. So more than six hundred million, and that would be the end of China. If you fly above China, you find out that so much of China is made up of villages, of subsistence villages. Probably very good culture there, but economically limited; surrounded by rice paddies or whatever the staple is that are keeping those villages alive. Well, if you take that village and make it into a Los Angeles-like village, that village is going to become ten times as big. So all the farming is gone. You have an endless suburban sprawl, which is the death of the country. EGG: So how would you describe your alternative? PS: I was trying to come up with a planetary hermitage. We tend to be hermits, especially now with the computer technology. Which means we tend to separate ourselves from everybody else and then keep in communication through the computer technology. Which is like a "magic" technology, and it's going to stay with us for good. But this communication is mostly virtual. It's based on virtual things, and that doesn't go very well with our bodies. We have a brain and we have a body, and if we separate the two from each other we are going to get in terrible trouble. And that's what we tend to do now. We separate our brains from our body, and then we connect with a machine. The machine bridges us to the next brain, so we have this level of communication and learning, and a database that tends to be virtual. So that's the hermitage I'm talking about. EGG: What does the rest of the architecture world think about you? PS: I'm not that interested, really. Oh, the usual. That he's a clown. That he's a visionary. The true visionaries are the clergy and all the theological systems that we have around. Those are visions, they are not realities. Those are visions. |
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