Today@Arcosanti - Public Relations category

LECTURES - PHOENIX PUBLIC LIBRARY

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:10:59 GMT

Last Thursday, February 2. 2012, Arcosanti Planning Interns mounted the exhibition of Arcosanti/Cosanti images, that Planning Coordinator Nadia Begin put together at the downtown Phoenix Public Library (Bruder Building).

On Thursday, Feb 9, Nadia and Jeff Stein have a public presentation/conversation there at 6:30-8PM with William Eaton, guitarist and instrument maker about THE ARCHITECTURAL INSTRUMENT.

[text: Jeff Stein]

[photos: Planning interns Yasaman Esmaili and Nick Klever are placing the last photos of the wall display for the exhibit on the second floor of the Burton Barr Phoenix Public Library].

The event is part of

PHOENIX RISING: The next 100 years
Color+Art in Contemporary Architecture

The Desert Environment Series presents "conversations" with educators, architects, musicians and visual artists every Thursday during the month of February alongside a month long exhibition in the Second Floor of the Burton Barr Library to celebrate the Arizona Centennial.

February 2nd,
5:30pm -6:30pm
Desert Environment Series Opening
Exhibit will be on display from Feb. 2- 29th on the second floor of the Burton Barr Library.

[photo & text: Nadia Begin]

[photo: Planning Coordinator Nadia Begin is giving final touches to the display].

February 2nd (Opening Night)
6:30pm- 8:00pm
Desert Sights & Sound and Simple Shelter
Rob Resetar - Videographer/Composer,
Teresa Rosano & Luis Ibarra - Architects.

February 9th,
6:30pm- 8:00pm
The Instrument Maker and the Architectural Instrument William Eaton - Musician.
Jeff Stein & Nadia Begin - Cosanti Foundation.

[photo & text: Nadia Begin]

[photo: The finished display that will be exhibited until the end of the month of February].

February 16th,
6:30pm- 8:00pm
The Education of an Architect
Victor Sidy - Dean at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.
Joslyn Hicks - Adolescent Program Director for Mission Montessori.

February 23rd,
6:30pm-8:00pm
Color in Hospital Architecture & the Grand Canyon Sergio Mejia - Architect from Mexico City.
Bruce Aiken - Painter.

The desert environment series started in 2008 by Alumni Alex Barragan as a Forum to discuss ideas on Engineering, Architecture, Industrial Design, Education and the Arts as they influence Arizona's Most Spectacular Environment.

The concept behind this month long event is:
*To ENCOURAGE the study of the great disciplines of Engineering, Architecture, Industrial Design, Education and the Arts.
*To EXPLORE new ideas, re-sharpen our imaginative skills and find ways to develop hidden talent.
*To REORGANIZE our studios, our business, or to take our projects to the next level.
*To APPRENTICE with the experts in the field of your interest.

[photo & text: Nadia Begin]

VISIT - BOSTON ARCHITECTURAL COLLEGE

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:41:31 GMT

Cosanti President Jeff Stein in Boston this week presented a copy of the new book from Cosanti Press, LEAN LINEAR CITY: ARTERIAL ARCOLOGY to Susan Lewis, Library Director of the Boston Architectural College. The BAC’s architecture library, one of America’s real treasures, hosted a reception several years ago for Paolo Soleri when he was named Cascieri Lecturer at the BAC. The library’s collection includes several of Soleri’s earlier books.

Photo: Jeff Stein and Susan Lewis

[photo & text: Jeff Stein]

MEETING - FIBER ARTISANS

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:07:09 GMT

The first "Meet & Greet Fiber Retreat" for Fiber Artisans - spinners, weavers, knitters, took place this past Saturday Jan. 28, from 9 am - 3 pm in the Arcosanti cafe.

[photo & text: Sue]

The meeting was a great success. Over 30 artisans came to share their work and expertise.

[photo & text: Sue]

There was quite a variety of finished items, lots of unusual yarn.

The general public was able to visit and peruse lots of handmade crafts, felted hats and bags, knitted items, wonderful scarfs and gorgeous yarns.

[photo & text: Sue]

CONFERENCE - ST. FE INSTITUTE

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:15:12 GMT

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]

[photo & text: Jeff Stein]

“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]

[photo & text: Jeff Stein]

BOOKS - LEAN LINEAR CITY

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:09:53 GMT

We are delighted to announce the Cosanti Press publication of LEAN LINEAR CITY: ARTERIAL ARCOLOGY.

This compact book (7" x 7", 196 pages, fully illustrated in color) is the first full-length publication to present architect Paolo Soleri’s Lean Linear City concept, a “traveling” city that aims to optimize logistics to the extent feasible, in part by being fully integrated with its vital transportation corridor. Soleri, who is known for his theory of “arcology” (architecture + ecology), proposes this “arterial” arcology on analogy with how arteries support the essential life-functions in an organism.

The book can be purchased on our website with the following link LEAN LINEAR CITY: ARTERIAL ARCOLOGY.

[image: YoungSoo Kim, Tomiaki Tamura & text: Lissa McCullough]

Lean Linear City features pedestrian-based communities oriented around linear local and regional transportation systems, fostering quality of life through urban mobility and access, while minimizing consumption of land and material resources of all kinds, including energy resources.

Lean Linear City: Arterial Arcology outlines Soleri’s comprehensive approach to defining and controlling growth patterns of existing and future cities to produce more sustainable, equitable, and robust urban forms. The book graphically illustrates how Lean Linear’s logistics are designed to cohere, enhancing the urban experience, minimizing waste, taking advantage of passive energy opportunities, and defining “smart” boundaries in relation to surrounding agricultural and natural lands.

As urban planners face the key issues of the twenty-first century—ever expanding populations, rapid urbanization, limited global resources, increased demand for food production, and protection of a fragile environment—Soleri proposes that logistically defined “arterial” cities may prove to be a viable option for sustainable urban development.

[image: YoungSoo Kim & text: Lissa McCullough]

[from introduction in the book]

Welcome to an important exploration of architectural and cultural thinking and design. Based on the pioneering work of Paolo Soleri, what you are about to read unfolds a collaborative new investigation of Soleri's idea for a Lean Linear City. In these pages architecture and ecology confront the vastness of the North American continent to create a complex and immanent solution for the future of the city. And this book, besides examining the design and methodology for creating an event of such enormous complexity, also describes why we must do it.

Humans want to connect: to each other, to goods, services, ideas. It is why most of us alive on the planet now live in cities: the city is the best instrument we have devised to make these connections. But we also want need to connect to nature, to the earth itself and to that bit of the earth‚s ecology we do not control. And we need to design ways to do that without overwhelming what remains of the earth‚s natural systems, habitats and landscapes.

[image: YoungSoo Kim & text: Jeff Stein]

This book describes a new parameter for design: leanness. It is based on a clear understanding of how life on earth functions. As the authors point out, because of our population numbers, because of the attitude we have taken until now about how to design and grow our cities, we are in some difficulty as a species. And we have placed every other species on the earth into some difficulty, too. A reformulated, lean design, the kind described in these pages, could very well be how we get out of it.

Architecture historian Christian Norburg Schulz points out that humans are wanderers by nature, always on the way. On the other hand, when we do settle and identify with a certain place, the result is architecture. ARTERIAL ARCOLOGY shows how we can reconcile this dichotomy of human life on earth, the dialectic of departure and return ˆ path and goal ˆ that describes our place in the world. While our current urban culture has been able to provide the civilizing comforts of buildings, possessions and literacy, it has yet to integrate these static comforts with the nomad in us, the part that is in love with movement.

To relate architecture and cities to their citizens, to an audience in motion, designers must make architecture work harder, designing buildings ˆ and cities - to be leaner, more like living things, integral parts of a living landscape, able to engage human senses beyond the mere visual. This emphasis on lean urban performance while carrying forth a new understanding of urban form characterizes the work of ARTERIAL ARCOLOGY.

This book comes to us at a watershed moment, when the very basis of culture and economy, and thus our relationship with each other and the cosmos, is being re-thought and requires re-thinking. A Japanese term for this is Hashi: the end of one thing and beginning of another. Hashi can be a bridge, chopsticks, or a book like this.

ARTERIAL ARCOLOGY, in this Hashi moment, presents some of the most important designs yet made for understanding the coming relationship of people, place and planet. I hope its publication will spark action among its readers, so that we can take our rightful place as humans on the earth, a species among many others, truly extra-ordinary in what we are becoming.

Welcome to the real work of the next generation, and to the lean, linear blueprint for how we can go about that work.

Jeff Stein AIA,
President, Cosanti Foundation

[image: YoungSoo Kim and Adam Nordfors, text: Jeff Stein]