Phoenix/Scottsdale - Paolo Soleri's "Cosanti"

Cozy, Cosanti is not. It is the fruit of an architect's labours, playing with concrete. Particularly sturdy, it is not either -- as various metal re-inforcing beams attested to. Cool, it is not -- as a 'lean machine' it has no air-conditioning, natural or other. What does it have to recommend it? Wind chimes, plenty of wind chimes. For sale. Starting at $29 for one the size of a baby's fist, and rising into the thousands for wind chime mobiles like the one pictured. Manufactured by hand from bronze (or clay) by underpaid foundry workers toiling in the 110F heat (no, that's not the furnace; that's the ambient temperature).

The site has a Star Wars feel to it -- which might be unsurprising, as both Cosanti and the film are essentially products of the 1970's, utopias (of sorts) set in desert wastelands. Soleri's concrete half-domes ('apses' in Soleri speak) reminded me of the desert dwarves' cave dwellings; the metal casts framing the wind chimes are skeletal like giant robot remains.

Paulo Soleri is now 91, and doesn't do much work on-site anymore, though he does still sketch -- female nudes between the ages of 21 and 41. Fliers in the gift-shop were asking for models.

Born in Italy in 1919, Paolo studied under Frank Lloyd Wright (possibly doing a stint at neighboring Taliesen West ) and then set up his own Foundation in 1965 or so. He came up with Arcology (= Architecture + Ecology) as a response to the urban sprawl that is Phoenix, and tomorrow we will visit Arcosanti, his more extensive 'living experiment' in urban utopia. Pretty much anything would be an improvement on the sprawl that has taken over the Valley floor since the advent of air conditioning in the 1950s made contemplating life in the baking heat of a Southern Arizona summer anything other than pure folly. Before that, the Valley of the Sun (Phoenix-Scottsdale-Tempe-
Mesa) had a population of about a hundred thousand; now it's the fifth largest city in the US .


Journal:
Till noon, did admin consolidating contacts and emailing to set up appointments. Lunch (dodgy re-heated moussaka) at the Arizona Center ('the only significant downtown mall') on Van Buren between 3rd & 5th Streets. Visited Cosanti from 2.30-4pm or so. Too late for Heard Museum (again). Grocery shopping at Trader Joe's, then Wren did another stint on the computer at a Scottsdale Starbucks (in the hopes Lori would respond before we left the area) and I picked up some crockery & silverware at the mega Goodwill on Thunderbird x 40th St. Home 7pm, microwaved tortellini for dinner. More 'homework'. And a dip in the pool - refreshing!