Hexahedron: Paolo Soleri’s utopia in context

“Duration is the continuous progress of the past which grows into the future and which swells as it advances.” — Henri Bergson

Paolo Soleri was an Italian architect and visionary philosopher. In 1949, he left Europe to apprentice for Frank Lloyd Wright at his academy in the Arizona desert. Soleri settled down in Scottsdale, spending the rest of his life designing, planning, and modelling futuristic city structures. His first book Arcology: The City in the Image of Man — released in 1969 — contains over 30 large prints of conceptual art, including his own scattered commentaries and notes. Understanding ‘Hexahedron’ — one of Soleri’s superstructure-organisms — helps to elucidate his philosophy of “arcology”. Albeit radical, Soleri’s utopian cities can be historically contextualized, emerging out of 20th century urbanization and developments in scientific theory.

Soleri’s utopias played with the organization of space in the physical environment. His philosophy ignored any intricate details concerning societal institutions, economics, or politics beyond mere design. The term ‘arcology’ is a fusion of architecture and ecology. Its basic premise stands on the necessary separation of the untouched natural environment and the built environment (i.e. the city). Soleri justified his design-philosophy in claiming that cities “should facilitate the growth and well-being of ordinary individuals.” Soleri’s cities were designed in his image of man. Like any organism, his cities would implosively evolve, increasing in complexity relative to the process of miniaturization.

Extending 1100 meters high, ‘Hexahedron’ covers 140 acres of land, housing 1200 people per acre. Dwellings wrap around the outermost layer, enveloping the metaphorical epidermis. Schools, offices, and cultural centres skeletally support the inner workings of the cognitive layer. Even deeper within, factories, warehouses, and heavy industry digest, pump blood, and regenerate the superorganism. Soleri’s sketch is three-dimensional. Towering ‘legs’ connect its ‘head’ with earth, resembling a bipedal animal. High-speed transportation shoots residents anywhere within the structure, including the surrounding wilderness. According to Soleri, highly complex organisms (e.g. humans) have evolved with a relative degree of compactness to be able to “fit more things into smaller spaces in shorter times.” Hexahedron is modelled on the advanced organism’s complexity and its ability to evolve implosively, increasing in complexity while making efficient use of space & size.

“There is a gregarious instinct in men, which has always made the city as large as it could well be” wrote Reverend Josiah Strong in 1897. By 1920, the majority of Americans lived in urban metropolises. Despite the promises of cosmopolitan life, masses of city dwellers suffered under the weight of a massive social and economic shift. Soleri resented the “large, formless, unorganized cities” of messy urbanization. He envisaged “the reorganization of urban sprawl into dense, integrated, compact city structures.” The tall, vertical structure ‘Hexahedron’ would not “spread an inorganic crust…over the vital green carpet of the green earth.”

After the release of his book, Soleri toured his utopian fantasies across the United States. Crowds of people flocked to see the eclectic architect’s designs. His vision to “help ordinary people live happily, grow personally, and achieve their individual potentials” was congruent with the values of 20th century Americans. In The Silent Revolution, Ronald Inglehart observed these shifting values towards individual self-expression and quality of life. Soleri’s humanism, positing man at the centre of activity & encouragement, itself stems from the emergence of rational man during the Enlightenment period.

Soleri’s philosophy was heavily influenced by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s theoretical musings. The French Jesuit posited evolution as a “spiritual striving…to even higher states of organizational complexity.” An increased complexity, according to Teilhard, “expressed itself spatially by the refinement of interiors.” Teilhard’s mechanistic evolution inspired Soleri to model his superstructure-organisms on the principle of implosion. He regarded the human mind as the “apex of organizational complexity,” and concluded that the ideal city must operate under the same natural laws as man. “Compactness” writes Soleri “is the ‘structure’ of efficiency.”

“Man” writes Martin Meyerson “has neither the wisdom, nor the knowledge, nor the skills in communication to present a cosmic portrayal of a total future.” Irreversible time — inevitably entropic — presents the fundamental challenge of design and creation. Soleri’s genius — and frail attempt to overcome this problem — was his ingenious synthesis of negentropic mechanistic evolution and city planning. To him, arcology was not a solution to the problems of the 20th century. Rather, Soleri presented his designs as a teleological destination (à la Marx’s historical materialism) in the natural unfolding of time.

Further Reading:

• Strong, Josiah. “The Problem of the Twentieth Century City.” http://www.jstor.org/stable/25118881.
• Meyerson, Martin. “Utopian Traditions and the Planning of Cities.” http://www.jstor.org/stable/20026647.
• Soleri, Paolo. Arcology: The City in the Image of Man.
• Dana F. White. “The Apocalyptic Vision of Paolo Soleri.”
• Inglehart, Ronald. The Silent revolution.
• Altman, Irwin, and Martin M. Chemers. Culture and Environment.
• Hartog, Rudolf. 1999. “Growth without Limits: Some Case Studies of 20th‐century Urbanization.”
• Busbea, Larry. 2013. “Paolo Soleri and the Aesthetics of Irreversibility.”
• Teaford, Jon C. The twentieth-century American city: problem, promise, and reality.
• Mishra, Pankaj. Age of Anger: A History of the Present.
• Grierson, David. “Unfinished Business at the Urban Laboratory — Paolo Soleri, Arcology, and Arcosanti.”