Visuals: Paolo Soleri

Architecture usually represents a compromise between the extremes of prostitution and dictatorship. The prostitutes are those workaday draftsmen who ply their services to the highest-bidding developer of big boxes for the city and little boxes for suburbia.

The dictators are those relatively few idealists who achieve prominence as artists, visionaries, or prophets, such as the late Frank Lloyd Wright and, currently. Paolo Soleri.

Like Wright – and to lesser degrees Corbusier, Saarinan, et al. – Soleri is essentially a sculptor, with a colossal ego. Wright expected people to live, work, worship, or absorb culture inside his sculptures; Soleri envisions his sculptures housing entire cities of more than a million people. Although Soleri has been hailed as a prophet of things to come, the large exhibition of his plans and models organized by the Whitney Museum in New York suggests that his vision is basically a throwback to antiquity. He is the pinnacle of the monumental mentality, the last of the pyramid builders.

The frail, diminutive Italian architect – a one-time student of Wright pere – has been working out plans for his gigantic arcologies (architectural ecologies) for the last ten years. His models, floor plans, and elevations are, for the most part, magnificent to behold (although if they were ever built to scale, you could behold them in entirety only from a distance).

Great pyramids, diamonds, triangles, and other solid geometric forms are supported in the air on colossal columns; there are clusters of gigantic, interconnecting towers. Some models bear a striking resemblance to M. C. Escher’s fantastic tetrahedral planetoids; some resemble cave dwellings or Tibetan lamaseries. “3-D Jersey,” one of Soleri’s most grandiose projects, looks like a cross-section of a giant turbine punctured by huge open cavities and notched with terraces and gear-like ridges. The model for Arcosanti, Soleri’s experimental project under construction on the Arizona desert, is a story-book castle. Variations on the idea include cities within dams, and a sleek bridge whose sub-deck would contain museum and convention facilities.

The Utopian ideal that Soleri’s visionary cities project is likewise attractive – from a distance, or reduced to imaginary dimensions. But it is one thing to visit a city – or a sculpture – and another thing to live there.

Soleri’s basic idea is to “compress” the present two-dimensional solids that would rise vertically into space. His goal is a paradoxical “miniaturization” that would reduce the distances between a city’s various parts, there-by increasing speed and efficiency and permitting a greater complexity of function, a richer, more elaborate “texture” of cultural and social life.

In a more or less typical project, like “3-D Jersey,” the “core” of the huge 300-story superstructure would house shopping centers, cultural institutions and other features of downtown, or uptown, commercial and social activity. Private apartments would take the form of thousands of cell-like spaces in the city’s outer “skin,” as well as in skyscraper-like supporting columns. The city would be surrounded by an airstrip, in effect becoming a huge air terminal. Factories and warehouses would be underground, as would public transportation to other cities or the surrounding countryside.

Elaborate traffic charts have been devised, following the daily routines of typical inhabitants to show that any part of the city could be reached from any other in no more than 15 minutes by foot, less via electric ramps and elevators; eliminating the automobile and its pollutants from urban life is one of Soleri’s prime goals. There would be roof gardens over the city’s various component units, and since the structure would fill less horizontal space than present cities, it would be surrounded by easily accessible open country, Soleri says. He adds: “Its exterior will act as a vast surface receptacle, gathering the energy of sun, wind, and water, and turning it to use.”

Soleri feels his visionary cities parallel a universal course in biological evolution, away from formlessness toward increasing “compression,” “miniaturization,” and “complexity.” “We are all miniature systems of infinite complexity, fantastically well organized,” he says. “We should see the city as an inner environment, rather than an outer one. We are creating a new animal, with thousands of minds, serviced by thousands of brains.”

Soleri insists that the obvious impact of his ideas in terms of increased physical efficiency and environmental conservation – much as these considerations have fired up many of his disciples – is strictly secondary to the goal of enriching human life. He sometimes refers to this ideal in almost mystical terms, but the general principle is that life is where the action is, and action is strictly a function of people. “Scattering is the negation of life,” he says. “Life is in the thick of things.”

There are hundreds of possible objections to Soleri’s ideas on every level, but it is precisely in the latter area – of human life – that his ideas seem most shaky, and that he himself is most vague.

Given the technological and economic capacity to produce moon landings and Disneyland, Soleri’s arcologies are probably within relatively close reach of our ability to build. Their seemingly monstrous logistical problems – What happens when a fuse blows out? How to control the water pressure on the 298th floor? – might not be greatly different from such problems now, and service and maintenance could conceivably be carried out with infinitely greater efficiency in proportion to the increased “miniaturization.” Compressing the present-day suburban sprawl into the structure of the city itself would logically leave surrounding land areas more open and free of buildings – although they would likely be as swarming with people as Ocean Beach on a warm Sunday afternoon.