Paolo Soleri And Green Architecture

Born in 1919, Paolo Soleri is probably one of the most recognized architects. He is a receiver of many awards during his career, among others the 2006 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for his lifetime achievement and the Silver Medal of the Academie d'Architecture in Paris in 1984.



Since 1970 Soleri started his work at the foundation Arcosanti, which is a planned community for 5,000 people, located near Cordes Junction, in central Arizona. The basic concept which sustains the whole foundation is Soleri's concept of "Arcology", a fusion between architecture and ecology.

He states that an arcology is a hyper dense city projected to maximize human interaction, such as shared and cost effective infrastructure services. As seen, the concept is based on ecology and wants to respect the 3 basic rules or the 3 Rs as they are called in the specialized literature: reduce, reuse and recycle. The arcology also aims to reduce the use of hectic energy or, at least, to improve the conditions by using additional energy sources such as the wind power, solar power or water. All in all, the Arcosanti is the prototype of desert arcology, which has been the obsession of Soleri over the years.

Sure, arcology would have looked beautifully in theory, but from there and until it was actually built, there were thousands of persons that criticized the idea and didn't actually see it as sustainable in practice. These largely hypothetical structures would have featured  a full range of residential, commercial and even agriculture facilities which would have reduced the impact people have upon the environment.

The contemporary society is confronting with loads of problems that have given serious thoughts to all scientists and country leaders, problems even more hard if not actually impossible to solve than the ones our ancestors confronted with. Lack of resources and most important, the over crowded population of Earth has been a concerning problem, especially in big countries such as China, India, United States or Germany.

These countries, but especially the first two are dealing now with massive unsustained populations and will soon face another problem, the one of insufficient resources to feed them. And while solutions are given too many, even through science-fiction shows or genocide, viable ones are yet to come.

Here interferes the archictect Paolo Soleri and his green architecture concepts; in his book, "Arcology: The City in the Image of Man", the author comes up with ways of compacting the already existent city structures in three dimensions in order to combat the two-dimensional urban sprawl. This, and in addition some really sustainable and green technologies are to be used in the future to have a harmonic development of conurbations so that people would be affected less by global warming and other contemporary issues.