Through a Glass Darkly

Today, we—I—met Paolo Soleri.

To give a just account of today would require me to start from the beginning, as there are so many momentous thoughts that need explaining, I can only do it from start to finish. So that's how I will describe it.

After the early morning construction work we went to Archives. Arcosanti houses a full archiving operation that seeks to catalog all of Soleri's works. This includes his drawings, his writing, his sketchbooks, his infamous "scroll drawings"—even ceramics and sculpture. The task is monumental, only equal to the body of his work. In terms of sheer mass in his body of work, the man is like Picasso.

But more than just mass, we got a taste of the quality of the work as well. We were ushered in by Sue, the Archive coordinator, into a temperature controlled room containing shelves and shelves of white notebooks with laminated printouts, long boxes holding drawings of massive structures Soleri had originally done on scrolls of butcher paper, and a small, lit area for photographing said works. After we were given a short description of the operation itself, which was a quiet, tedious affair—I was quite interested in their web-based push in Archives, seeking to make a Wiki of all of Soleri's terms and philosophies, as to understand it all would take nothing less than a Wiki-type system—we were seated at a long table while Sue went to retrieve one of Soleri's original sketchbooks.

What she brought out I would never have guessed to be a sketchbook. It was a 14"x17" block of cast aluminum, carved with undoubtablely Soleri-esque designs. When she set it on the table with white cloth gloves, it gave such a clunk that it felt like it could have taken a cannonball hit. On the side was a latch. She popped it open, and, while explaining that there were seven such sketchbooks, bound by Soleri himself, revealed fragile pages of drawings, most often drawn in ballpoint pen.

These were the original drawings that ultimately became the Arcology designs in The City in the Image of Man—the book that caused Paolo to explode onto the international scene of architecture. Sue, with white gloves, carefully leafed through the pages, which were intricate and complex, yet looked more like artwork than blueprints. She explained that these sketchbooks had all been catalogued and photographed, and that the originals themselves were never taken out except for workshoppers like us and special visitors.

Seeing these drawings is probably like having the original sketchbooks of Dali unfolded for you, personally, or maybe having an original Picasso revealed to you in the company of friends. The sheer weight of the physical sketchbooks, I think, was a telling metaphor about the weight of the drawings they contained, while penned on such fragile paper. These sketches had ignited a whole world of philosophy, sociology, and urban architecture in their time. They were the root, in many ways it seems, of Soleri's efforts and thinking.

The day went on. The sketchbook was put away and were then allowed to peruse laminated micro-versions of the scroll drawings. The longest scroll drawing Soleri had done was 176 feet. Width of these scroll drawings ranged from two to four feet. I recognized many of the drawings from the books I had read years ago when I first became interested in Soleri and his work. Sue also pulled out an original—a short one that, again, was more like art than architecture, and had been cut out along the impossible city's skyline. At first, it looked like parchment rather than butcher paper, but this was because it had been reinforced at the back. When she unrolled it, which was the size of the whole table (a conference-sized table, basically), it revealed the wax coloring on the inside. The whole thing had been colored in, unlike most of Soleri's drawings, which tended to be devoid of color.

Of course, this was barely the beginning. While we looked over the laminated versions, asking questions about the scale of the buildings and wondering whether any of it was even practical, there was a knock at the door. Sue opened it, and in stepped Matteo di Michelle, one of the workshop cooridinators. Right behind him, in tow, was Paolo Soleri himself.

At the sight of the number of us in the room (I've been told this is an unusually large workshop), Soleri's reaction was first of visible surprise, and a warm, generous smile to follow. There was a flurry of activity suddenly, as Sue and the other Archive employees, with Matteo, organized the room with chairs so all of us, most of all Paolo himself, could sit. It should be noted that this upcoming summer holds Soleri's ninetieth birthday. Time was written on his face and body, but he did not use a cane or any other sort of major help beyond a hearing aid. He was ten years senior of my step grandfather, who had died at eighty or so and was a military man, with a consistent regimen of morning exercises. As time was written on Soleri's body, so was a timeless sort of health that becomes those artists and other practicioners of life that have reached their full potential.

As we sat with Soleri, we asked him questions via a book, as directed by Matteo, that we had been recommended to read earlier in the week. This book was sort of a reader's digest of Soleri's terms, philosophies, and thoughts about Arcosanti, organized into two-paragraph chapters per topic. Before a question, we would read allowed the two paragraphs from the book, then ask a question based on our response to the chapter. Though conversation was allowed to meander from there, this was the basic format.

I cannot account fully what Soleri said to all of us, but I can bring up the question that I asked. I had made a list the night before, and picked one specifically about sacred space—the term sometimes used to describe the overwhelming presence of cathedrals. In my short time here, nevermind past times, sacred space was present at Arcosanti. But while cathedrals have a very defined sense of sacred space—namely, what within them that is "sacred"—Arcosanti's presence is mysterious, even dauntingly so. Paolo Soleri is a devote atheist, yet consistently refers to such things like the Omega Seed, Resurrection, and other eschatological singularities that occur at the end of time—an outgrowth of Teilhard de Chardin's philosophy regarding the Omega Point (also called Christogenesis). Thus my question: what is sacred at Arcosanti?

He smiled as I asked my question, especially when I mentioned the affect the architecture had on my personal mentality, in comparison to a cathedral. I know quite surely that Soleri entirely intended Arcosanti, all of his structures really, to be cathedrals, but cathedrals of a kind of god that can not be named—should not be named. It is probably confirmation that the architecture, which in his view, I think, is really a tool, and nothing more—but it shows that the tool is working.

His answer went to the origins of life, no less. Starting from the single-celled organism, which had the potential to grow and create more life, compounding itself along an evolutionary pathway into what eventually became humanity, he described that the sacred element—at least, that I believed he wished to capture, and that I think he has in fact done in architecture—is that impulse of the cell, the generation of life, as the sacred thing. He related this as being the trajectory of life—basically, the direction towards what Teilhard described as the Omega Point (he didn't say this outright, but I knew it was the trajectory he referenced)—or, a sort of coalescing of not just physical evolution, but social evolution. Probably what Buddhists would call the cultivation of right mind. The only reason why it was sacred—and this is the tricky thing with Soleri—is the fact that the point it reaches is sacred. He will never bestow the title on anything else, even the process itself. So, in a sort of convenient explanation, the trajectory itself retroactively takes on a sort of holiness, though he would refute practically any other thing being called "holy," even this notion of Becoming itself, as fictions or idolatry.

We spent a good forty minutes talking with him. We had Frugal Soup with him(a sort of ritual where we all have a basic soup in silence to remember world hunger), during which I sat next to him, and I sat next to him again a few hours later at School of Thought. School of Thought had a much more rigid pattern than our discussion in the Archives. It was open to all residents and tourists, so there was a larger group, and everything was moderated, to an extent. In a way I am not surprised, both due to Soleri's age and the fact that he is, in a way, the greatest resource of the community here.

I will not be embarrassed to say that, initially, I had a bit of a hero-fan mentality, especially when he first stepped into the room. There are a lot of people that describe Arcosanti, mostly out of ignorance, as a cult—either a religious one, or a cult of personality. The latter may hold some water. But for me, being across the table from this man is comparable to being across the table from a Nietzche, or a Heidegger, or a Kierkegaard, with almost one-on-one access. I had read his, sometimes physically huge, books on Arcology, American hedonsim, and weird concepts like "the Lean Alternative" since I was sixteen. I feel then that I may be forgiven for having a bit of hero-worship for the man, and feeling that there may just be a heightened sensation of… something, I'm not quite sure what, of being in the presence of, in my opinion, an incredibly deep and prolific mind.

That said, especially after the School of Thought session, I realized that I am a bit late to the party, so to speak. Call me greedy, but I wish that he was a decade or two younger, where it might not be unusual to have a pancake with him or a cup of coffee, where I could ask him questions out of convenient passing as he strolls the Arcosanti site. I had no illusions about his age, nor about the fact that I am lucky to meet him as it is. It says something about his lifestyle and outlook that he would still come to meet us, at nearly ninety years old, to expound and defend writings that he had written forty years ago, when we ourselves are no older than twenty five tops and have had only three days to absorb it all. But there is a gap in eras now between his generation and mine—enough of a gap that even while being in his presence and having him answer my question, it is only like, as Paul says, "looking through a glass, darkly" into this person that produced this amazing body of work and thought. Again, I have no illusions regarding this place, its situation of sporadic growth and perhaps futile effort, and I have no illusions regarding Soleri's theories and writings as being those of a philosopher, and not a scientist. In fact, I am convinced now that the practicality of many of his architectural drawings are out of the question from an engineering perspective, and that half of it was probably being drawn for pure shock value. But it was a shock value with a purpose: to jar the navel-gazing culture, which I think he is now, in old age, only sad to say that has not improved much, in his view.

I may not have had the luxury of others who got to spend time with him and converse with him when he was able to walk on top of the apses of "the Project" as he refers to Arcosanti. But I count today as luxury enough. Artists, philosophers, and thinkers only embrace writing to be understood freely and without charge by others after they are gone. Thus I am content to have the rest of my questions answered over endless pages in books, rather than over a pancake and coffee. And as I have no illusions about this place and its idiosyncrasies (I would like to think), Soleri has no illusions about the body of his work, and the fact that much of it never came to physical fruition. It is the changing of hearts and minds that a thinker strives for, and I think that Soleri is content, even happy, with what he and those around him have achieved. The structures that we create around the ideal are never "the point"—in fact, and ironic for Arcosanti that its ideal is based around architecture—they may even get in the way. But it is the thought, the original spark of creativity that propels forward future efforts, from one who is 89 years old to one who is 21 years young, that is important. Like the trajectory of the original cell, it is the thing that is "sacred"—because it is all we will ever have. And we would be foolish to think that we would ever need more.