Arcosanti and Hoover Dam
May. 1st, 2022 04:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
roozleMid April for me was all about a road trip from Phoenix to Las Vegas with @totient. I'm not going to write much about the Grand Canyon except to say that, as impossible as I thought it was to be more impressive in person than in pictures, pictures do not do it justice. I was surprised with how much beauty I found in the desert landscape - getting to Red Rock Canyon in spring while the desert plants were in fascinating bloom was an experience I'm deeply grateful to have had. And I can't say much about Las Vegas, though I'd never been there before. The quick glimpses I got of its "too much is never enough" spirit were somewhat overwhelming.
Two of our stops were at Arcosanti and Hoover Dam, and this was just such a study in contrasts.
Arcosanti is an "archology" - a word made up by Paola Soleri to describe an urban architecture designed to be in harmony with its ecological environment. Soleri designed dozens of these, but Arcosanti is the only one that has been even partially constructed. Over the course of the last 50 years, the construction has been done by volunteers, in stages, out of slipcast concrete, to create densely filled multi-use structures that support art and residence and community gathering spaces intermingled, to fit harmoniously into the desert around them. Arcosanti is built with great attention to passive heating and cooling, orienting to the sun to fit with the seasons. I was surprised that it was not completely solar powered, but the technology that would support that was not around when it was originally designed. Arcosanti is intended to be a densely populated space that facilitates interaction among the people there, thereby being a laboratory of sorts for new kinds of urban environments, and it is intended, when fully built out and populated, to be largely self-sustaining through locally based intensive agricultural methods. But the Arcosanti we saw is a long way from the utopian dream. Arcosanti today survives through tourism and through making and selling bronze and ceramic wind chimes. It is unfinished, still on the grid, only growing a small percentage of its food. It holds, today, 85 people rather than the 500 that Soleri's design called for. Since Paolo Soleri's death a decade ago, it's not clear what drives the future vision of the site. Arcosanti is hauntingly beautiful and a unique place in the world; the tour touched more on architecture than what it was like to live and work in that environment, and left me with a lot of questions.
Hoover Dam is also built by humans out of concrete, but the resemblances end about there. Arcosanti is meant to blend with nature, Hoover Dam dominates. The speed and scale and intensity of its construction, the way it shapes the landscape, and the impact it has on the landscape of the entire Southwest through flood control, water supplies, and powers supplies are mind-boggling. But what I noticed most of all was the oblivious self-congratulatory triumphalism with which all of this was described. None of the problematic aspects of Hoover Dam are mentioned in the tour or in the exhibit hall on site. Here are some of the missing words: ecology, race (a few dozen of the 21,000 who built the dams were Black, but you'd not know that from the exhibit), indigenous people (the exhibit text still talks about American Indians, in one sentence), water conservation, and, of all things, climate change. You look out from the dam into the basin of Lake Mead, with the water level hundreds of feet below the edge of the basin, and the problem of the moment is staring you in the face. How low can the water go and Hoover Dam still operate? What happens when the turbines stop? None of this existed in the ahistorical world of the Hoover Dam tour. What a missed opportunity to convince an audience full of people who already think there is something special and interesting at Hoover Dam that there's work to do for it to survive over the next decades.
So in the end, both Hoover Dam and Arcosanti had me thinking thoughts about sustainability. On the scale of how small is too small for a community to keep going, and what happens when you are too tightly tied to the vision of one man, on one end. And on the other end, on the scale of the entire watershed of the Colorado River, of the lives and livelihoods of millions of people downstream from the dam, who have because of Hoover Dam been able to temporarily forget the harsh water limitations of the Southwest.
Two of our stops were at Arcosanti and Hoover Dam, and this was just such a study in contrasts.
Arcosanti is an "archology" - a word made up by Paola Soleri to describe an urban architecture designed to be in harmony with its ecological environment. Soleri designed dozens of these, but Arcosanti is the only one that has been even partially constructed. Over the course of the last 50 years, the construction has been done by volunteers, in stages, out of slipcast concrete, to create densely filled multi-use structures that support art and residence and community gathering spaces intermingled, to fit harmoniously into the desert around them. Arcosanti is built with great attention to passive heating and cooling, orienting to the sun to fit with the seasons. I was surprised that it was not completely solar powered, but the technology that would support that was not around when it was originally designed. Arcosanti is intended to be a densely populated space that facilitates interaction among the people there, thereby being a laboratory of sorts for new kinds of urban environments, and it is intended, when fully built out and populated, to be largely self-sustaining through locally based intensive agricultural methods. But the Arcosanti we saw is a long way from the utopian dream. Arcosanti today survives through tourism and through making and selling bronze and ceramic wind chimes. It is unfinished, still on the grid, only growing a small percentage of its food. It holds, today, 85 people rather than the 500 that Soleri's design called for. Since Paolo Soleri's death a decade ago, it's not clear what drives the future vision of the site. Arcosanti is hauntingly beautiful and a unique place in the world; the tour touched more on architecture than what it was like to live and work in that environment, and left me with a lot of questions.
Hoover Dam is also built by humans out of concrete, but the resemblances end about there. Arcosanti is meant to blend with nature, Hoover Dam dominates. The speed and scale and intensity of its construction, the way it shapes the landscape, and the impact it has on the landscape of the entire Southwest through flood control, water supplies, and powers supplies are mind-boggling. But what I noticed most of all was the oblivious self-congratulatory triumphalism with which all of this was described. None of the problematic aspects of Hoover Dam are mentioned in the tour or in the exhibit hall on site. Here are some of the missing words: ecology, race (a few dozen of the 21,000 who built the dams were Black, but you'd not know that from the exhibit), indigenous people (the exhibit text still talks about American Indians, in one sentence), water conservation, and, of all things, climate change. You look out from the dam into the basin of Lake Mead, with the water level hundreds of feet below the edge of the basin, and the problem of the moment is staring you in the face. How low can the water go and Hoover Dam still operate? What happens when the turbines stop? None of this existed in the ahistorical world of the Hoover Dam tour. What a missed opportunity to convince an audience full of people who already think there is something special and interesting at Hoover Dam that there's work to do for it to survive over the next decades.
So in the end, both Hoover Dam and Arcosanti had me thinking thoughts about sustainability. On the scale of how small is too small for a community to keep going, and what happens when you are too tightly tied to the vision of one man, on one end. And on the other end, on the scale of the entire watershed of the Colorado River, of the lives and livelihoods of millions of people downstream from the dam, who have because of Hoover Dam been able to temporarily forget the harsh water limitations of the Southwest.
no subject
Date: 2022-05-02 04:17 pm (UTC)We've wanted to return to experience more of that desert ever since we had a short taste. On our way back from the Reno Worldcon, our lay-over, in Las Vegas was long enough for us to rent a car and spend an afternoon at Red Rock Canyon. I would have liked to see more and I suggested Lake Mead and the dam but it didn't work out that way.
I'd read about Arcosanti, when I was a kid. I hadn't realized that the founder was around until so recently.
no subject
Date: 2022-05-09 09:20 pm (UTC)It's impossible to grasp how big it is, because our brains don't do that.
The closer you get to Grand Canyon, the bigger it gets. (I know, that sounds obvious)
On the map, it's big. Flying over it, it's bigger. Driving up to the edge and holy shit it's huge... start walking down and it keeps getting bigger pretty much all the way to the river.
A couple years ago we hiked down to Phantom Ranch for an overnight. It was impossibly large.
We also stopped at Arcosanti. My experience was a bimodal mix of "they're all fucking doomed" and "Wow, this is really, really neat." It felt less like an organized mission, and more like a bunch of hippies clinging to a dream. They hadn't solved the fundamental problem that living in the desert has: Water. In theory they could get solar panels and windmills and solve the energy problem, but they're still trying to live in the desert like white people.