Arcosanti Habitat Coordinator Scott Riley and Cosanti President Jeff Stein met Monday morning with engineers Halleh Landon and Ali Ardebili of ESD/Energy Systems Design in Scottsdale. ESD is an electrical and mechanical engineering firm at the cutting edge of sustainable design, recommended to us by Arcosanti alum and City of Scottsdale Sustainability Director Anthony Floyd.

Scott and Jeff are seeking proposals for heating and cooling Arcosanti’s bakery upgrade/renovation on the third floor mezzanine of the Crafts III building. Solutions for this small but complex space will be a test for larger systems (including how to use greenhouse air) throughout Arcosanti.

The work is meant to continue to support the reason we are here: BECAUSE of our location in central Arizona, not in spite of it. ESD will research ways to meet codes and comfort requirements while still allowing folks at Arcosanti to feel connected to sun and seasons and place.

ESD’s own LEED-certified offices overlook the Soleri pedestrian bridge and plaza and themselves take advantage of serious and elegant (as in ‘mathematically elegant’) energy-saving mechanical and electrical designs/devices. More to come…

[photos: Halleh Landon and Ali Ardebili,engineers at ESD, Scott Riley at EDS with low-flow A/C vents as wainscote]

ARCOSANTI IN SANTA FE.

Cosanti Foundation President Jeff Stein has returned from a speaking trip to the Santa Fe Institute, America's center for theoretical physics and research into complex adaptive systems. (Santa Fe, of course, is also home to one of Paolo Soleri’s first large architectural commissions, the Paolo Soleri Amphitheatre, still standing.) Invited there for research collaboration by Institute Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West, Stein’s presentation described the following:

“Abstract: Cities, and over half the world’s population living in and around them, are now clearly an integral part of earth’s ecology. Arcosanti, the urban experiment founded 40 years ago by architect Paolo Soleri in the Arizona desert, would place cities at the very center of that ecology, at the very center of the web of life on earth.

[photo: the seminar room at SFI]

“While those who can afford it continue to trade nature for buildings and their energy needs, Soleri and his Cosanti Foundation have been investigating something very different for more than a generation. That exploration – and its accompanying construction work – continues to promote and develop an urban form (Arcology: Architecture and Ecology) that could foster interdependence and social and ecological well-being through density, frugality and a profound awareness of place. Meant to embody a holistic understanding of the city as a scalable organism, Arcosanti’s intent is to focus the twin evolutionary forces of miniaturization and complexity on the problem of urban design.”

At the Santa Fe Institute Stein engaged in discussions with SFI President Jerry Sabloff, spent time with West’s team of post-doctoral fellows working on the physics of the growth of cities – “Cities, Scaling, and Sustainability” - and spoke with Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-mann, discoverer of the Quark, who participated in the Arcosanti Minds for History conference back in 1989.

Several architects from the Santa Fe area also attended Stein’s seminar, including Ed Mazria, executive director of Architecture 2030, the global organization working toward reducing fossil fuel use in new buildings to carbon neutrality by 2030.

[photos: Murray Gell-Mann's famous book and Jeff Stein]