ArcoBlog

Our monthly email newsletter is back! Read up on what’s been going on at Arcosanti, Cosanti, and The Cosanti Foundation. To subscribe to our email list and receive future newsletters, go here.

Should we start reconsidering the Arcology model in the face of growing weather and health risks? I’ve been a fan of Arcologies ever since I learned the term and realized its potential to protect employees. Had Apple or Facebook built one instead of more traditional office structures, their employees likely wouldn’t have had to change their work environments. The employee’s kids could

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  The City & Narrative by Nathan Hays   African acacias protect themselves from herbivores by producing a poison within their leaves when they are damaged. But these miraculous plants have a far more surprising strategy. They speak, and they listen, in a language that moves by us unnoticed. An ethylene compound fills the air around them and is carried

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“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” That was the French mathematician and Catholic theologian Blaise Pascal writing in the mid-1600’s. Now, some 350 years later, many of the 8 billion of us humans alive on the planet today get to see if he was correct. Just looking out at the sky,

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By Timothy Bell Over this past weekend, Arcosanti hosted the annual Convergence Conference and Festival. During these three days, experts working in the fields of social justice, science, agroecology, permaculture, and beyond, all gathered to exchange ideas and celebrate at the Urban Laboratory. Our challenge to ourselves this year was to prove that a Festival could be regenerative. The dream

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By Jeff Stein Allison Arieff: you know, founder and past editor of DWELL magazine; currently editorial director for the urban planning and policy think tank, SPUR / San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association. She writes about architecture, design, cities and technology for the Opinion section of The New York Times. In the TIMES Sunday OCT 6 edition

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By Jeff Stein Now look here, and as you do, please find a couple of paragraphs that describe Charles King’s new book about cultural anthropology and the small group of people who, nearly 100 years ago, made it both a discipline and a game-changer in western civilization. I send you this, on a perfectly fine end-of-September afternoon, because I think

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By Johann Haslauer, Landshut, Germany Arcosanti Alum What is Paolo Soleri’s philosophy? What is the philosophy of Arcosanti?   For his investigation, Johann Haslauer from Landshut, Germany, tries a kind of “deconstructive” approach: Not through an academic analysis of Paolo’s writing but through his very personal encounters with Arcosanti. That means to also interpret the built work as text, and

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By Jeff Stein   “This is not a pipe” Rene Magritte   The artist Rene Magritte (1898-1967) worried about his fellow humans misunderstanding the world by experiencing it only through images. “The treachery of imagery” he called it and made this painting that describes his concern. Of course, the issue for Magritte was: it’s a PICTURE of a pipe. An

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By Jeff Stein Doug Aitken and Zach Tetrault; these two are old hands at Arcosanti. Over the years, both at Arcosanti and beyond, they have proclaimed in print and through their work how the power of Paolo Soleri’s ideas has made a big impression on them. You may have seen the YouTube / Sundance interview that Aitken did with Paolo

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