A late welcome to the June 21. 2009 workshop participants, already at the end of their second week:

[back from left]:
Jean-Paul Whittall, Jay Carscadden [2 weeks], Eliot Clerke, Tanner White [workstudy and internship in planning], Vittorio Leone [workstudy], Keegan Carmichael, Craig Dietz, and Craig Capano [2 weeks].

[middle from left]:
Felly Tesei Limpangui [internship in planning], Charles Russel, Lee Davis-Mayberry and Jovan Tanasijevic.

[front from left]:
Anna Tran [internship in archives] and Jacqueline Ashby [seminar week].

Due to the long report about Paolo’s birthday party, we are a bit behind with usual news.
The May 17. 2009 workshop participants graduated on June 19. 2009:

[from upper left] Workshop coordinator Matteo Di Michele hands graduation certificates to Maria Cabrera and Matthew Blunderfield. Riccardo Campanella and Erica Bazzini remain for an internship in planning & graphics.

[From left] Induja Lakshmi continues with an internship in planning. Rocio Montefiori participated in the Soleri archives during and for a few weeks after the workshop.
Also graduated, not in photos, is Kwun Sau Chiu, who continues as a volunteer in the maintenance department, and Robert Graddy, who continues in construction.

More images have arrived and we could keep up this report for another couple of weeks, but, this is the last sequence of the 90th birthday party-Alumni Reunion event report.
James Horecka sent other terrific images and this came in this morning, showing the AVALANCHE BAR mixer, location under the pool, occasion the inauguration of the pool bracing project [more on this project upcoming]. This image was taken on Friday, June 19. 2009.
And here is a link to James Horecka flickr presentation of his visit for the birthday event.
James: "Optimized for monitors with aspect ratios of 4:3 (mine is 1600x1200), in a darkened room".

And Laura Powers sent a whole sequence of Russel Ferguson with Bergen Carlson-Price, son of Tom Price, on Friday afternoon, doing what Russel did a lot of over the years here at Arcosanti, building a rock wall, this one at the pool-bracing project.

The Saturday evening event closed in the Colly Soleri amphitheater. After the amazing FLAM CHEN performance, everyone drifted back into the amphitheater for the unveiling of the DREAM CAPSULE, presented by THE MAGPIE COLLECTIVE.

Alumna Melinda Barnadas brought collaborator's Tae Hwang and Chad Nielson from the Magpie Collective, and set up studio in the café. The project was for everyone's participation, to record individual vision for the future and have this recording, writing, drawing, put into a balloon. The balloons were inflated and put into a huge capsule, with small LED lights at the bottom and some quietly tinkling bells attached. And at the end of the evening of this amazing birthday celebration, a group of ‘handlers’ brought the glowing and tinkling dream capsule into the amphitheater and walked it from level to level, a sweet and calm closure to the days events that brought a big smile to everyone’s face.

This continues the photo report of the June 20. 2009 FLAM CHEN performance for Paolo Soleri's 90th Birthday party.
Many beautiful images were submitted and we could only choose a few.
Thank you again for the contribution of amazing images, Alfonso Elia, Tomiaki Tamura, James Horecka, Stu Jenks and Daniel Anderson.

[photo: the moment before bungee jumping from the top of the Vaults, right into the birthday party]

The photos speak for themselves.

Some very poignant and touching tributes were given to Paolo during the evening. One such was made by Ira Murfin.
Alumnus Ira Murfin, author, playright, actor and director, worked with Paolo Soleri for several years as Paolo's editor.

"The first time I saw Paolo was at a Morning Meeting the first or second day of my workshop. That particular gathering was marked by the presence of a live rattlesnake, trapped in the five-gallon bucket used for relocation to the desert. Those here who have put in their time at Morning Meeting know that such show and tell is not unusual.
We all gathered around – not too close, we stayed back several feet, peered in cautiously, and saw the snake coiled and resting at the bottom, small in his five-gallon prison. It was then Paolo, unmistakable to me even at first sighting in his sleeveless t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, walked by, when someone called out to him.
Without a hiccup in his gait, he turned toward the bucket and approached it, stood with exposed toes against the base and leaned his head down nearly to the rim. Unperturbed, with a look of curiosity and mild amusement, he tapped two fingers against the bucket’s side, twice, hard, as if trying to stir the inhabitant.
Everyone around him gasped, tensed, whispered careful, but Paolo stayed still, smiling down. No response. He shrugged, and shuffled on to the bakery as Morning Meeting continued as usual.

I keep returning to this story of course because the first time you see someone who will become so central in your thinking and your life always becomes a memorable occasion, but also because I think there is something metaphorically quite appropriate about this tableau and it is not only Paolo’s bravery in his approach – there are two things about it that remind me who Paolo is, what he’s done, and how he’s done it. First, it is that willful tap on the bucket, that jolt, and then there is the patient equanimity of his response.
Arcosanti has proved an effective and comfortable container for many of us. But our contentment alone is not what Paolo is after, as instigator he subjects life inside the laboratory to regular jolts of intellectual agitation. To live at Arcosanti is to engage in challenging daily inquiry into life’s organization, and life here within the project is no less subject to such challenge than life elsewhere. Paolo resists the temptation of trendy and reductive labels. Instead of “green”, he opts for “lean”. He is not being obstinate, rather accurate. Arcosanti is an urban laboratory, decidedly urban and decidedly a site for experimentation.

Paolo insists on specific language, he resists complacency and sentimentality when it comes to his accomplishments. If power consolidation were his goal, it would behoove him to simplify his message and fortify his theory against challenge by imposing on it a theological orthodoxy. But that is not his goal. His goal remains to consider the city, and indeed life and then reality, as a whole, a system. Paolo is not interested in making his work current or saleable, he is interested in making work that is, like all great cities and indeed all great projects, radical and in constant evolution.
In this Paolo stands also as an example of the power of quiet routine, of commitment in the long term, patience, and the practice of incrementally working through. To me this is Paolo, a true iconoclast, radical, revolutionary, but at the same time the most measured of men, living a life he himself has compared to the monastic, writing, rewriting, and writing again, approaching and re-approaching key words and ideas, drawing, carving, building, shapes and patterns repeating, working through.

We look at the arcology designs and see a radical novelty, the world as it could be. And we want Arcosanti built now, yesterday. We are impatient for the next implementation of arcology theory and the next. But one of the many gifts of working with Paolo on a daily basis for the couple of years I was privileged to do so was to witness such intricate design, such ontologically significant theory emerge from the steady determination of measured daily practice. Perhaps more than any human being I can think of, Paolo embodies this balance between the small, pragmatic tasks of the immediate and the evolutionary accrual of self-awareness. Rarely, if ever, does Paolo lose sight of one in favor of the other, and this has been a source of consternation for partisans of both approaches.

Nonetheless, when tonight’s festivities are through, Paolo will head off to bed, rise early on the morning of his 90th birthday as any day. There are some events to attend to tomorrow, but he will most certainly set aside a bit of time to put down some thoughts, as he would say, about the weekend, or the nature of reality, a new urgent variation on lifelong themes.

What I hope comes through for you in all this, Paolo, is the importance of the role you, both your work and your life, have played in the lives and thinking of so many people, those here tonight, the thousands more who have spent some weeks and months here and at Cosanti over the last half century, and the many, many, many more who have brushed against your writings, your designs, your buildings in one way or another and have found it changed their lives.

Arcosanti affects the life and work of so many more people than we see or know – it has entered the culture, it is irreversibly part of our understanding of the possibilities for the city and our understanding of human potential.
This is what we are here to celebrate, your prototype of life and its container, this example you’ve built and this example that you are, and the fact that, despite the measure of your accomplishments, you persist in regularly delivering new deliberate pragmatic and philosophical jolts to us all.

Thank you & happy birthday, Paolo!"

For many years the FLAM CHEN group visits Arcosanti during the summer [see posting of July 29. 2005], and always brings new and exciting performances of extreme theatre, new circus tactics, martial arts weaponry, all set in a medium of fire.

This year the group was accompanied by the ODAIKO SONORA drummers, and delivered an absolutely stunning and totally amazing event, starting with a group of dancers in the amphitheater ....

... after which the audience moved to the front of the music center to behold three of the dancers, the Three Graces, suspended from the crane above the pool ....


.... and above TRISTAN'S GARDEN, the pool shoring project.

There are so many gorgeous photos this year that we will stretch the report for a couple more postings.

Thank you so much, Daniel, James and Alfonso, for contributing these amazing shots.
More tomorrow, Friday, June 26. 2009.