

This book is about miniaturization.



Foreword

It has never been very clear to me why a book requires a foreword. If the reason is that the body of the book is not self-explanatory, then the need for a foreword does not speak very well for the body of the book. And if the reason is that the book requires some sort of endorsement, then the foreword should, really, be written by a book salesman, i.e., an obviously interested party. (Nobody is ever fooled by ostensibly disinterested parties anyway.)

I am not really in a position to write a traditional foreword to Paolo Soleri’s book: first, because I am not sure I understand it—and so I cannot possibly interpret it with authority. (I am awed by it.) And, second, because I am not a disinterested party; I am his friend.

Having disqualified myself, let me proceed with the ritualistic foreword.

Who is Soleri? Answer: He is a wiry, medium-height man around fifty who was born in Torino, in Northern Italy, where he received his Doctorate in Architecture. After World War II, he came to the United States and became apprenticed to Frank Lloyd Wright. He was one of Wright’s two or three most brilliant students and was therefore kicked out by the master. Since that time, more or less, he has lived and worked in Scottsdale, Arizona, writing, drawing (on endless sheets of butcher paper), and building—both on his own acres in Scottsdale and elsewhere in the United States and Europe. He supports himself and his family by making ceramic and metal bells that swing in the breeze and make nice sounds.

What is he trying to say? Answer: I am not completely sure, because this is a very difficult book to read. Like many so-called visionary types, Soleri has invented his own language, and some of the words in that language won’t be found in any English dictionary. (Curiously enough, some of those words are a bit reminiscent of Italian Futurist talk of fifty years ago.) What I think he is trying to say is this: there is an inherent logic in the structure and nature of organisms that have grown on this planet. Any architecture, any urban design, and any social order that violates that structure and nature is destructive of itself and of us. Any architecture, urban design, or social order that is based upon organic principles is valid and will prove its own validity.

What is he trying to draw? Answer: A new world based upon those principles. And beautifully, too! What is more, it seems as if the first settlement of this new world may soon be rising on 4,000 acres some 70 miles from Phoenix, Arizona, on a lovely plateau 3,700 feet above sea level. Here, Soleri and his students—eventually as many as 2,000 people in all—will soon build Arcosanti, a community based upon the principles developed in this book. It will be, in Soleri’s words, a self-testing school for urban studies, a place where teaching and living will go on in an environment that is, in fact, the lesson itself. It is a daring project, and it will require financial support; but it is, to the best of my knowledge, the only New Town currently planned in the United States that started with a visionary idea of real force—rather than a mortgage.

Is he practical or is he crazy? Answer: In view of what has been happening on this planet in recent years, it is safe to say that those in charge are neither practical nor sane. This does not mean, of course, that any visionary profoundly critical of the present order of things is necessarily more practical or more sane. All it does mean is that anyone committed to the present way of building buildings, cities, or societies should disqualify himself as a critic of Soleri’s proposals. In one of his more lucid statements, Soleri says that the care of the citizen is the sap of the city. But one can care only for that which one loves. A lovable city is the key to a living city. A lovely city is not an accident, as a lovely person is not an accident. I rather doubt that the New York City Planning Commission, say, is likely to make LOVE its master plan; but if it were to do just that, who is to say that LOVE is not a more practical and a more sane policy than whatever that Commission is following at present?

Why should anyone read Soleri’s book? Answer: because that is the best way to gain access to some very remarkable ideas—ideas that will challenge just about everything all the rest of us keep doing, day after day. Soleri says that the fundamental distinction between the city and the anthill will be not just brains by the score but also minds by the score. This book is the work of an extraordinary mind. I keep thinking of Antonio Sant’Elia, who—to the best of my knowledge—never built anything at all, but whose drawings of ideal cities have profoundly shaped every modern city in the world.

In any event, I have not seen a book on architecture and urban design, recently, that has bothered me as much as this one. If that is an improper foreword, so be it.



Peter Blake

New York

January 1969

Preface

The written content of this book is really an endogenous affair for and with myself. In both knowledge and information my credentials are very limited, but it must be recognized that the conceptual criteria for the arcologies are the necessary stuff of their makeup. If I were to present the arcologies without their theoretical background, I would not be supplying any foundation for the conceptual process nor any comprehensive justification for the results. By limiting myself to the presentation of my own model of reality, I would be presenting a fragmented thesis and would not be able to follow up with a constructive proposal. There are perhaps many people better qualified than I am to elaborate a credible or usable model of reality. There is no one to my knowledge who has an awareness of the environmental consequences of the thesis here presented, much less made a serious effort at the deployment of any proposal.

The thesis demands a transfiguration of the earth without defiling or disfiguring its own cosmic aspects. The performance of the professionals, engineers, architects, and planners are doodles on the back of a cosmic phenomenon and will not do. Unlimited doodling produces squalor. In fact, the massive intrusion of irrelevance is enough sand in the cogs of civilization to spew out evil, in a very pragmatic sense. The exponential savagery of chaos is the outcome of false order, an order deprived of structure.

This work seeks a definition of the problem in its more general terms, an environment suitable for the species of man, a coherence that may be historically valid. To keep the reader engaged in the continuity of the process and conscious of its cosmic scale (and thus meaningful only within such dimensions), terms have been used that reiterate this concern. For the purpose of self-clarification, a theory has thus been developing parallel to the planning ideas. A theory is a framework of reference per se, fairly neutral. The use one makes of it measures its validity. Though constant adherence to a theory may sometimes dull the mind, it is a way of seeking and achieving coherence in one’s work. One tests both theory and the new idea by wedging one into the other. What follows is such a framework, whose great limitations do not completely cancel the advantage the author has derived from its personal construction.

To help the reader understand the material presented here, I have adopted two devices. The first is the use of diagrams to illustrate roughly the concepts. The second is the use of italics for the fraction of the written parts that I feel carries or condenses the ideas. It is possible for the reader to go through the italicized portions in an uninterrupted sequence and then come back to the complete text. Each chapter was written on a different occasion, a partial explanation for the lack of continuity.

A warning is necessary for the student. The graphics are not to be taken literally. The symbolism is evident and is characterized by the different hands that helped to produce it. The complexity of the system would in any case preclude the possibility of well-thought-out detail in the general context in which this book should remain.



Paolo Soleri

Scottsdale, Arizona

January 1969

Part One The Concept of Arcology

Man can be understood only by ascending from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. In other words he is first of all a cosmic problem.



Teilhard de Chardin

Reflections of Energy

Review of scientific questions(orig. text)  (October 1952)

…that power from which we derive so much pride, what is it in truth but the subjective consciousness of a progressive weld of humanity to the physical universe of which the great determinisms now act, no longer as formidable outsiders, but as through thought itself, colonizing us for a silent world of which we have become the agents? (orig. text) 



Claude Lévi-Strauss

Tristes Tropiques (1955)

1. Utopia

This work has a critical part and a constructive part. They are treated concurrently in the first section, where criticism is coupled with what in my view is a perspective suggesting a greater coherence. To help focus the problem, I have simplified it greatly. I do not feel this invalidates the results because the argument is kept in the context of a peach not being a potato and not of a peach being yellow or peachy; and the results are not a blueprint for a city-civilization but only a guideline toward a new option. After this first part follows the development of thirty schemes based on theoretical propositions and then a proposed micro-experiment in Arcosanti by the Cosanti Foundation.

In the critical inquiry it is assumed that the best hopes for contemporary man have been fulfilled and the urban medium has been cleared of slums and cleansed of ills and grievances. If there is no mention of segregated minorities, of slum clearance, of exploiter and exploited, of tax unfairness, of bossism, of children killed by delivery trucks, of skid-row peripatetics, of pets not allowed, of profit incentives, of self-help, it is because one assumes that in time the skill of man will take care of them all. The foundation of equity is thus granted. There is then happy man within the full-fledged coordination of city and suburban expanse. Megalopoly stretches over the continents from top to bottom, from left to right, emerging victorious and shiny above an unending and felicitous suburbia.

The critical end of this work is to confute the truth of such a condition; that is to say, such a hope is doubly false. It is false because it is not feasible; it is utopian in its inner contradictions and its detachment from the tenets of life itself. It is false in the sense of being deadly, a scourge many times worse than the squalor of present days.

Life’s bulk is negated when megalopoly and suburbia are taken as the environmental bulk. Their existence and hypothetical validity are at best only peripheral, the spurious fringe to a far more substantial structure. The inquiry is then into the construction of a congruous environment that such structure may define.

The questioning implicit in the first part of this book is aimed at the validity of the ideal we have put to ourselves. The contention is that this ideal is the result of a mortification of the worth of man and a partly involuntary abdication from the fullness of life, that it is fundamentally an evil, antilife proposition. The constructive end of this work is not to find either a timid alternative or a cure-all answer. What is attempted is the clarification of some of the very elementary processes by which the life of man and society seem to evolve, and then, using these concepts, the effort to define broadly some concrete organism coherent to the platform of the fundamentals reached, a platform regarded as historically valid. The position taken is evolutionist. That is to say, I have little doubt that life in general and human life in particular can be symbolized by a vector and cannot be symbolized by a random pattern. Vectoriality is the character of living reality, and the care of man is basically a willful or unconscious action with or against it. (Figures 9, 10) Antivector forces collect themselves in the unlimited reservoirs of entropy. The provector forces are striving at the reduction and eventual consumption of such reservoirs through a process called here the aesthetogenesis of the real, process and end, themselves the stuff of life. In this context utopia is the disavowal of any vectorial urge that might exist in the species of man and a settlement for something less than engrossing, for instance, a giving up in the calm sea of affluence.

2. The Map of Despair

Figure 1: Ecumenopoly

Figure 2: Arcology

Constantine Doxiadis presents a frightening world map. The American continent is covered with a kind of fabric that reminds one of a dark and torn flannel worn by a strong torso. The holes are large but are just holes. (Figure 1) The dark fabric is ecumenopoly, the universal city. The holes are the areas where the earth breathes and renews itself: a map of despair. Doxiadis forecasts a continent transformed into a human backyard. The teeming human ants are everywhere, and everywhere are human ants. Nor will the holes be spared. They will not be pockets of farmland or wilderness. They will be dotted by subcolonies and will be invaded weekly by waves of schizophrenic vacationers and seasonally flooded by a tide of discouraged suburbanites given to temporary nomadism.

The quasi-unbroken membrane of biological and mental matter prognosticated by Doxiadis will be sheltered by the nonbiological paraphernalia of the man-made. The Athens and the Florence of the Golden Ages will be stamped out in thousands of copies—ten thousand of them for a mass of one billion, one hundred thousand for a mass of ten billion, and so on. The thinking is that of a creature bound to a surface existence. He has been given a surface enveloping a solid sphere, and he is doing his level best to carpet it with one or two or five layers of performance. It will not do.

One hundred to five hundred layers of performance will grossly produce a shrinkage of ecumenopoly to one one-hundredth of its suggested size. Instead of a stagnant and far too extensive layer of pseudo-urban environment, there would then be fibers of dense vitality running over continents and seas, ribbing the surface of the planet. (Figure 2) They would actually be urban rivers whose core would serve for transportation and communication, whose top would be an endless airport, and the sides the actual urban substance. In the foundations and around them, the producing plants would be cybernetically organized. Taking off from the urban rivers, or coming to them, would be urban systems of smaller dimension ending or taking off from large modular cities, the subject of this book. The material presented here is a schematic reference to modular urban systems that find full coherence as appendices and as origins of the urban rivers, carriers of the bulk of civilization.

3. Miniaturization

The demands of acceleration and deceleration, a slavery peculiar to matter in motion, a slavery not imposed on light, ultimately force on matter the inescapable need for miniaturization. Miniaturization is the process that minimizes the prime handicap of the physical world: the time-space strait jacket. This law or rule is so universal as to guide investigation possibly to the ultimate convergence among the apparent divergences that occur within the universal stuff of matter and energy and the puzzle of life versus death. Miniaturize or die has been the key rule for incipient life.

As the subject of this work is the city, one might anticipate here, and not just metaphorically, that miniaturize-or-die is and remains the condition sine qua non for the development of the social, collective animal contained in the towns and cities of the world. Secularization, the existential mark of our present, will be allowed or rejected by the advent or not of the physical miniaturization of our urban centers. This occurrence is not just the key to success but the aim evolution has put to itself at this conjuncture of history.

It could be argued that nothing new ever occurs in time, if not that a certain and constant polarity is slowly producing, in increasing numbers, clusters of performances in ever more complex systems. The living organism would be the collection from the four corners of the universe of a number of compatible happenings. Conception would be the trigger for such an implosive process.

In the case of the mind, where the unlimited possible implodes into the finite real, the farther away it finds food for its development and the more numerous the data caught in its net, the greater is its power, that is to say, the greater is its miniaturizing power, which depends in turn upon the degree of its own miniaturization. It is as if step-by-step evolution would take account of itself and make a complete synopsis (miniaturization) of its achievements in order to have at its finger tips all the available power for the next leap (Figure 3), demonstrating that the container of universality or wholeness must be the miniaturization of the best instruments available.

Figure 3: Miniaturization

Figure 4: Universal Miniaturization

Figure 5: Miniaturization and Space

In a sense, there is miniaturization of matter and miniaturization of performance. One copes with the challenge of the future to the degree of success permissible by the degree of the other (and vice versa).

Evolution suggests a pulsatory behavior that has devised a miniaturizing process for each step moving from matter to mind: miniaturization from unending and spare cosmic existence to geological matter, miniaturization from geological matter to organic stuff, miniaturization from organic to organism, miniaturization from organism to animality, miniaturization from animality to reflectivity (man). Now that man is working at the full characterization of the ultraorganism of the human group, another miniaturization is mandatory.

All these successive miniaturizations are necessary because of the incremental complexity inherent in the progression. The greater the complexity, the greater the spatial and temporal obstacles to performance. Thus the necessity of fitting more into less, both spatially and temporally speaking, is proportionally greater. Furthermore, one can distinguish two kinds of miniaturization: general miniaturization—from the possible to the real; specific miniaturization—the evolutionary complexification of the real. (Figure 4)

If the universe is a deterministic machine, general miniaturization now belongs specifically to man, as he is the one whose inquietude makes the choice among many possibilities a more than theoretical decision.

That which miniaturizes into the real, but does not subsequently undertake specific self-miniaturization, becomes one of the dead limbs of history and is given back to naught. The society of man faces this danger, and because of the scale of his existence relative to the size of the earth, man is also directly endangering the existence of the earth itself. Inwardly, any organism is a superb device, a marvel in complexity, compactness, and congruence—a miniaturized universe. Outwardly, as a member of a group, it is little more than a torpid fraction of a cumbersome mechanism. The superanimal constituting society has not undergone the miniaturizing metamorphosis, and it is by its very nature totally unprepared for the performance of its designated task.

Society must become a true organism that will perform adequately. This will be made possible through the power of miniaturization. The physical miniaturization of its container, the city, is a necessary step to this end.

If we do not succeed in specifically miniaturizing our society, which has come from a possible existence in the species of man to a condition of elemental concreteness through the phase of general miniaturization, then this same society will not accede to the existential dimension of groping evolution.

Society has not yet been given the self-perpetuating stamina that characterizes organisms. It has to be constantly reasoned or forced into accepting its own existence and taking it more seriously than it does when facing its incipient death wish.

Society is still an awkward animal suffering from a kind of flat gigantism that nails it to the surface of the earth. (Figure 24) It is sclerotic, asphyxiated. It is poisoned by the wastes it profusely produces and cannot expel. It is troubled by inner strife, not so much out of exuberance as out of cellular self-centeredness. It is to a very dangerous degree unfit to live. But society may well be the only road open to man. Its miniaturization will make the difference between his confirmation or his death.

This situation makes technology not simply useful but necessary. Man cannot possibly work at the miniaturization of the environment he produces before the right instrumentality has been invented. That the reason for the existence of technology is the necessity for the miniaturization of the world of man is not consciously known by the technocrat. It would help if he were conscious of this because a clear aim may avoid the occurrence of major mistakes, conspicuous among them the car and suburbia. The urban implosion will have two by-products. One will be a proportional expansion of the earth. The other will be the feasibility of orbital colonies interacting with earthly ecologies. (Figure 5)

4. Equity and Congruence

Figure 6: Equity without Congruence

Figure 7: Equity with Congruence

Society is founded on equity and is constructed on congruence. The category of equity is specific to the human species and owes its existence to man’s peculiar ability for doing wrong.

Congruence is a more universal character. It is present in nature. In a sense it is nature itself because her working is a constant coordination of disparate things into congruous patterns. With man this apparently automatic congruence ends. Most of man’s deeds are governed instead by antagonistic rules: love and hatred, enlightenment and obscurantism, peacefulness and belligerence.

The plight of the underprivileged and the indigent demands the instauration of equity. The pursuit of equity is primary and essential to man.

The pursuit of congruence is substantially the transposition and the transfiguration of natural congruence into a congruence embracing the human condition. It is the humanization of the earth, and as such it demands a global coherence .

To try for congruence bypassing equity is to give up the human condition. The sort of congruence so pursued may well end in total determinism, for which life can come as cheaply as the deterministic mechanism proposes. This would be a congruence of things soon to diffuse back into the sluggish congruence of fate. Congruity, be it between means and ends, between effort and result, between pain and the worth, between stresses, between dimensions, or in general between the part and the whole, is a relationship or a measure of balance. It is an ecological factor.

In the concept or precept of equity the congruence factor is purely internal, relative to the ethical frailty of man, a measure of equality in the face of misfortune or, more generally, a comparable ability to face hardship socially and economically. But because of its internality it may well happen that a good measure of equity will not imply a general congruence at all. A good social and economic precongruence does not correspond to a general global congruence (Figure 6), that congruence which relates man not only to his social and economic milieu but also to the whole earthly (ecological) environment.

Congruence is a function that tends to overflow all boundaries because it must call in cause whatever exists at a specific time, hence its ecological relevance. (Figure 7)

The contemporary human milieu lacks both equity and congruence. To take the United States as an example, despite extremely complex overlappings one can immediately see which devastation is caused by inequity and which is caused by incongruence. Racism, bigotry, greed, and fear are working against equity. Imbalance between efforts toward analysis and efforts toward synthesis, unconcern toward the ever more chaotic environmental puzzle, unwillingness to look for the roots and consequences of any endeavor, and, in general, an unlimited permissiveness construed as freedom are working against congruence.

If indeed equity is a clear demand upon the personal and collective conscience, the essential force of congruence is broadly unfelt or ignored in both personal action and social and environmental ways. There are now no signs that such congruity within society and between man and nature is consciously or unconsciously pursued. There is a kind of savage intercourse of forces toward a poorly understood neighborliness on a space ship that grows relatively smaller and concretely uglier.

It is thus that even equity per se would not assure validity nor would it be a grantor of perpetuity. It might instead resolve itself in equity in death, a man’s exodus into inequity.

The hard fact is that equity without congruence is illusory. It is only an egalitarian common condition surrounded by an outer inertia and indifference that in its natural pervasiveness will dispose of the depositories of equity as a matter of natural fact.

The starting point of the exposition is that a platform of equity is far from defining a condition of congruity and that the pursuit of such an elusive and constantly fluctuating condition is a task as staggering as it is essential. In bits and shreds the concepts pursued in this book are about congruence. The import and the indispensability of equity are taken as obvious and, for the purpose of the book, close at hand. In this sense the outlook is futuristic or, better, evolutionary.

5. The Condition of Man

Figure 8: The Condition of Man

Man is not created equal. Man is not created equal because he is not created but evolved. With evolution comes inequality. It is quite possible that if there were pure order at the beginning, order by order, an identical ancestry would extend each man down to his origin with an identical pattern of facts and wills. The horror of that needs no further consideration. As things are, each ancestry is an original unreproducible reality that the present vitalizes through each individual endowed by it. This inequality is all that blesses man and that brings him sorrow. One of the consequences of inequality is the endless variety of expression by which the stringently organized species of man goes on seeking its own plenitude. (Figure 8)

Is there a sense in defining a threshold beyond which variety spills into chaos? Or is chaos itself the full substance of variety? If variety and chaos coincide, we are the helpless spectators of an unbreakable cycle that sees an amorphous state of origin end in an amorphous state of finality where a potentiality for freedom has been bartered for a self-deceiving randomness. (Figures 9, 10) If, on the other hand, variety is exactly what chaos cannot be, then variety must be essentially a structural phenomenon. The inequality of man will then be not a sign of weakness toward chaos but the ribbing of the social body (homosphere) by its own propensity toward structuration. Society is structuralized by its own unevenness. If this is so, such unevenness cannot be a blind scattering of resistances to a non-corresponding set of stresses. It has to be a circumstantial distribution of resiliences to the no-less-circumstantial set of environmental stresses.

Planning is the word used for the grouping of the configuration, the result of all the elements of investigation, analysis, data collecting, and data processing in reference to a particular set of stresses. There is the planning of nature and the planning of man. Geological nature plans by its unending patience, made of unlimited time carving unlimited spaces. Biological nature plans the construction of instinctive drives, the instinctive wisdom of the biological life developing over immense cycles of time. Man deprived himself of such a marvel the day he first saw himself and the first question came to his mind. Man, short on time, small in space, plans by constant extrapolation, and he can do so in ever greater measure by pushing farther and farther the boundary of complexity, complexity being his own special kind of unlimitedness—infinity. Planning is then essential to life, the alternative being chaos. It is somehow the stuff life is made of. Man lives by it, even if more than often he meets death because of it. Bad planning in such a case.

Figure 9: Axiality

Figure 10: Casualness

In the context of environmental planning one could say that a valid renewal plan for a city can hardly be conceived if the mind does not have a stored-up vision of what the possible can offer under optimal conditions, or if the actual problem is not put in theoretical perspective wherein each of the many facets takes light from a unique focus, the focus of the historical moment to which the solution must remain true or else fail. The focus is really the head of a vector thrusting into the future (Figures 9, 10); thus the necessity of general, theoretical investigation and the importance of utopias where the ifs are accepted as the best potential, the hows must produce as much as they can, and the whys embody the real motivations.

The practical will always pluck out one by one the impossibilities, but even from such benighted archetypes will come enough design, structure, and inspiration to reconstruct a coherent organism.

On the other hand, the fragmented, industrious approach will not stand a coherent judgment. If the knack for the feasible does not show the powdery nature of the practical, it is because it can only reach the periphery of the real, which is where, at best, the practical stands. The real is the present. The practical is in most cases the past, a frozen imagery of the real not fully becoming. The American dream is the present as practicality rather than the present as the real.

Man is faced with the following syllogism: (1) The city is the cradle and the expression of civilization, and (2) materialistic society has all but destroyed the city. Thus, (1) materialism is foreclosing man’s destiny, and (2) the city is a nonmaterialistic phenomenon. If the city is a nonmaterialistic phenomenon, it follows that a speculative (business) attack on the urban problem is devoid of the fundamental power the solution demands, i.e., the care of a nonspeculative commitment. As speculation is, or was, instrumental for wealth, that which is not instrumental to it, but is rather its user, is that which is committed beyond speculative aims. Speculation can be instrumental to the city. It cannot be its aim.

As the city cannot be speculative, so it cannot be a handout by authority. The handout never cares. It is indifferent, just another aspect of the speculative exercise. Any care it may have had at its origin has been lost in bureaucratic meanders and their parasitic agents. Care is a first-person undertaking. The care of the citizen is the sap of the city. But one can care only for that which one loves. Lovableness is the key to a living city. A lovely city is not an accident, as a lovely person is not an accident.

Free enterprise, the accidental compounding of speculative endeavors, if extended from the hows to the whys of man, becomes a killer. Free enterprise has had a technological success of a sort. Socially and environmentally it has been catastrophic. That is possibly the strongest reason for the impoverished environment of the United States. Its cities are a monument to chaos, social savagery, and amorphism.

Architecture redefined may open a door to the quest of the city for a new life. Architecture is the physical framework for the life of man, exterior to his own and all other biological frameworks. Architecture is the physical form of the ecology of the human, that configuration of matter which allows for the best energetic and willful flux. The care of architecture for a single building is peripheral to its basic weight as the environmental determinant. The city is a human problem that has to find its answer within ecological awareness. Short of that there is no answer; the problem remains unsolved. If to some this may seem a matter of course, to most the proposition carries no weight at all.

The condition of man is strictly dependent on environment because man is eminently an environmental animal. If one adds that man is also eminently a social animal, then one sees that environment comes close to being preponderantly the city. The city is the true concern of architecture.

6. Yesterday’s City and Today’s Reality

The subject of city planning is then metropolitan man. How can physical conditions be such that he may be and express himself fully? What he does within the society he so constructs is our civilization.

Metropolitan existence is a construct of private and public life so articulated as to provide each resident with a plentiful physical and economic access to both.

Metropolitan life means access to the source of economic well-being, to all the institutions that make up the culture of a country, to the institutions of health, education, leisure, play interaction, and to the non-institutionalized aspects of private and collective life; short of this plenitude (access to it, that is to say), metropolitan life is not justifiable. In brief, the social animal is a lively and splendid animal, or it is a contemptible one, depending upon whether the city is to be sought for what is liveliest in man or whether it is a dump for all the parasitic aspects of his character.

In view of the exponential enlargement of what the possible is, and consequently the ever-growing appetite of men for all and everything, in view of the consequent impatience contained in ever-shrinking time packages, metropolitan life is assuming a sprinter pace that tends to be sustained for the whole marathon of an individual life.

The existing metropolitan pattern is not made for that. Even if constructed around a less insane transportation system, it would remain a pretty inefficient mechanism at best. (Figure 23)

Practicality, the pride of this nation, has failed American civilization. The most practical man on earth, and the wealthiest on top of that, finds himself in a most extravagant and irrational position. The American metropolitan man is just plain silly, and he is becoming conscious of it.

The evolution of the one-layer city has been brought to an end by the rubber wheel. There are no real answers in the cities as we have known them, and, what is more, practical man must face reality. Economic incentive is not a realistic guideline to the intricacies and the mystery of life. One Detroit makes this clear; fifty Detroits would make it fifty times clearer.

Logistical failure is the one fundamental and purely mechanical reason for the decay of the city. Because of it, the price of metropolitan life is beyond what society can afford to pay. Mechanical failure makes it humanly unfeasible and economically impossible for the city dweller to desire and reach metropolitan institutions, whether they exist or not. (Figure 19) If such institutions are put out of man’s reach, they die, or they are not even conceived (suburbia). The outcome is a cultural stillness in the small community or large suburbia, combined with the worst aspects of megalopoly.

No organism can overcome prolonged starvation, even if it is starvation in the midst of plenty. Every one of its organs becomes segregated in an attempt to survive, and such mutilation brings about their abandonment one by one. (Figure 19) The present reduction of metropolitan life to a pure struggle for survival is the reason for the conception of a more apt system.

It is most reasonable to begin somewhere with an island of functional sanity and let its pattern spread according to its own merits, neither coerced nor coercing.

7. Structure and Performance

Figure 11: Structure and Performance

The Geological is the Massive.

The originator of gravity and the grand storage of raw material and energy.

The originator of gravity and the grand storage of raw material and energy. The Vegetative is Extensive.

The fixer of sun’s energy and the life-maker.

The fixer of sun’s energy and the life-maker. The Reflective is Intensive.

The transfigurative and creative.

Nature goes from bulk (the geological) to complexity (man); nature goes from static (the geological) to dynamic (man); nature goes from torpid time beat (the geological) to duration (man) by the intermediary of photosynthesis and animality.

That which lives wants to become three-dimensional for the sake of complexity and intensity. But it has to keep itself two-dimensional in the whole so as to deploy itself and feed on the sun (less so in the seas). Nature harvests extensively so as to be able to become intensive by man’s presence and evolution. In the cosmic context the massive is statistical, just, and logical mass of the earth becomes sensitized and, groping with its surface, vectorial and aesthetocompassionate in its nodular focuses, the society of man. (Figure 11)

The photosynthetic veneer, the vegetal world, must not be overlaid by a man-caused opaque veneer. This would mean final disaster. The opaque veneer might be the physical institutions of man (home, city) or the wastes these institutions produce, such as pollution. In either case ecological balance is fractured, and the consequences escape man’s foresight.

An observer situated on Mars and looking at the earth would have registered in this last century (1) an opaqueness extending between the surface of the earth and his instrument, an uninterrupted cloud of dust and fumes produced by civilized man; (2) a shrinking of the greenish areas covering vast parts of the earth’s surface—not the yearly pulsation from one season to the next but an apparently irreversible process suggesting an alteration in the nature of the earth’s surface; he sees the substitution of an urban and suburban web for the countryside; (3) a graininess of the seas extending from every delta and estuary far into the open in a tide of polluted waters.

The task of ecological architecture is the inversion of the process that the Martian can detect from his cosmic viewpoint. It is a cosmic task, that is to say, an evolutionary phenomenon. (See Miniaturization.) (Figures 3, 4, 5) The projection of vectorialized society on the surface of the earth may well show itself in a pattern not too dissimilar from the one Schiaparelli wishfully thought he had detected on Mars, the channeling of the doings of man into vast rivers of action on a harmoniously preserved and man-organized (agricultural) landscape. (Figures 2, 25, 41)

8. Life is in the (qualified) thick of things.

The earth is a solid wrapped by a sensitized skin. The sensitized skin is the spread of vegetation and animal life covering its surface. In the seas such skin is thickened within the depth of the water’s body. 2. Man is the direct offspring of the sensitized skin of the earth. He is an hyper-sensitized and vectorial fiber of it. He, like all animals, depends on the vegetal world for survival. If the vegetal world perishes, man perishes. The ecological balance of the earth is awesome but delicate. Both vegetal and animal life are possible only within a condition of relative denseness. The degree of liveliness is proportional to the degree of compactness of the organism. Tenuity is inimical to life. In the vegetal world the necessarily low ratio of energy yield to irradiated surface is the barrier to greater compactness and thus to the complexity of its life. The liveliness of the vegetal world is limited by the extension of its skin and the dilution of its body. Compactness is the structure of efficiency. Within compactness the energy flow is commensurate to the function that is being performed. Richer is the life where greater is the complexity. Therefore, greater the need for energy and thus greater the need for compactness (immediate relay). If man is not the inventor of society, he is its liberator from the prison of determinism. With man the social organism is not solely a dogma to abide by (insects and other proto-human societies), but a creative force seeking even greater individualization. The city is the container of man’s social organism. It is the body of the social super-organism. It is where man makes history. In the city post-determinism man constructs his highest approximation to plenitude, in a world totally unconceivable by the bee-hive or the anthill. If the city organism is to flourish, the container must be the most apt system to care for its life. It must allow for the greatest and freest flow of energies and things, for their swift interaction, for the liveliness and knowledge such interactions produce. The compact city is a three-dimensional city. Its vertical dimension is congruous to its horizontal dimensions (cube, sphere, cylinder, tetrahedron). The city must be a solid, not a surface. The three-dimensional city is respectful of the earth’s sensitized skin. It does not spread an inorganic crust (megalopoly-ecumenopolis-suburbia) over the vital green carpet of the earth. The three-dimensional city, because of its true efficiency (frugality), is also respectful of the earth’s ecological systems and its atmosphere. It does not pollute the earth. The three-dimensional city is respectful of man because it is the best instrument for a full private and social life. The three-dimensional city is an instrument of culture.

In direct translation: The liveliness of man’s world is hindered by the physical extension of his shelter and the spatial dilution of his institutions. Life is in the (qualified) thick of things. The city must then be predicated on compactness. Lack of compactness is lack of efficiency. A functionally weak system is the worst foundation for a complex society. In the three-dimensional city, man defines a human ecology. In it he is a country dweller and metropolitan man in one. By it the inner and the outer are the skin distance. He has made the city in his own image.

Archology: the city in the image of man.

9. The Bulb of Reality

Figure 12: Animal World

Figure 13: The World of Man and Society

Figure 14: the Disassociated Human World

It is obvious that attention must be centered on the subject: man. But man has an ancestry and an imminence, and man is truly the earth itself if he is anything . Total man is a preponderance of physical matter organized to perform physiological processes. These physiological processes are ends in themselves inasmuch as they are self-gratifying, and they are means to an end inasmuch as they participate in the construction of a species. The species is an end in itself inasmuch as it defines a specific triumph of sensitivity over indifference (the inorganic) and a means to an end inasmuch as it is the constant originator of the individual. The individual is an end in himself inasmuch as he is a member of the family structure. The family structure is an end in itself inasmuch as it is self-gratifying and a means to an end inasmuch as it is the smallest plurality of individuals of which society is composed.

The real organizes itself like layers in an onion bulb. Each of these is an end in itself and a means toward greater complexity and scope. Whatever the layer, any motion toward a new synthesis (or layer) is predicated on the backing of the preceding. IF the vegetal layer were not there to feed it, the world of the flesh would be inconceivable. In the same way the species of man is not possible without the preceding animal layer. (Figure 12) Each new layer is contained and sustained by the preceding. It is not an accidental excrescence.

As to the individual, the family, and the social layer, we see them welding and compenetrating each other. The growing complexity sends back to the biological and physical layers messages that become more and more exotic. Their answers become less and less satisfying. It is perhaps then that the individual jumps out of the family and social layer to seek his own answer (rugged individualism, free enterprise…). He soon finds out that his energies are not commensurate to the effort required. He, as an individual, cannot create the world in his own image. The fire of reality burns him to a crisp. (Figure 14)

And yet the world, as it is, is not fair or satisfactory. Man must refund society as a cradle instead of a prison and communally move toward the establishment of a new physical layer, a neo-ecology that will be the new fertile ground where the seeds of the species may break into fruition. (Figure 13)

The body social is as if it were not, because of its fragmented physical container. It is a prisoner of its own inefficiency. An ideal container, working as a prototype, must then be introduced as the ideal pattern of the neo-ecology. This new physical layer is the new necessary container for man’s changing nature and the enormous bulk of man-made goods he wants to carry along.

That is to say, the first step must remain as much as possible in the layer of the physical, that new geo-ecology that supports the biological, human, and social. The scope of the model phase of arcology is then to produce a theoretical plan of such a neo-ecology.

Thus we remain in the layer of the neonatural, the physical. Because of this, information from other disciplines is limited in this model phase to background reference, a bit of a sounding board on one’s own experience as a social animal.

10. Priority Chart

Figure 15: Priority Chart (Side View)

Figure 16: Priority Chart (Top View)

Reaches (Such Reaches are submitted to curtailments and to physical barriers.)

Discriminative (human) Mandatory food, shelter indispensable freedom, culture Instrumental productivity (useful) Auspicial occupation, leisure Accidental singular experiences

Curtailments

Segregational (subhuman) Destructive poverty, hunger, spite Coercive ignorance, segregation, bigotry Sterile automatism Debasing sloth Nonsensical the extravagant

Physical Barriers

Energy- Time- Space-consuming Distance Time Weather Tenuity Disorder Traffic Loads Lack of design Rigid schedule Cost Storage of transportation means

Each metropolitan man has to be at the center of the metropolitan world. Such a world at the exclusive use of one man is not possible for two reasons: it is physically nonsensical and culturally contradictory. Then the only open avenue is the organization of all urbanites into a very close fabric around a dense urban center. No technical treaties or semantic convolutions can change this. True urban life is that, or it is not. (Figures 15, 16) It is surprising that with this a great number of other problems find adequate answers (see Summary). One suffices here: urban man finds himself to be a country man as well because the countryside is at walking distance from any point in the city. (Figures 20, 21, 22)

11. The Organism of a Thousand Minds

Figure 17: The Biological Organism

Figure 18: The Arcological Organism (The City)

To govern the miniaturized universe of an organism, there is the brain, the mastermind and collector of memories. It is said that in some of the largest animals of the past, in addition to the cranial brain, there were also local substations of decision-making matter. But in a very substantial way, to each body belongs one, and only one, central institution of give, take, and accounting. (Figure 17)

If we ever have a superorganism made up of men, men retaining their own uniqueness, then such an organism will be made up of thousands of millions or more of brains. Furthermore, each of those brains will contain a mind, that is to say, will overgovern that power of choice among the endless propositions of the possible, the one-at-a-time performances making the present. (Figure 18)

This will be the fundamental distinction between the city and the anthill, the beehive, the termite colony, and so on: not just brains by the score but also minds by the score.

The romantic and the rugged individualist will speak out immediately about the mindlessness of the human beehive. They might want to glance at nightmarish suburbia with its six billion individuals; but it is their privilege not to reason about mankind and the staggering logistics it is faced with.

Indeed, the organism of a thousand minds exists today in thousands of examples: the towns and cities of the world, none too successful, most of them without a future. It is an organism so flaccid and so tenuous that even the elementary demands of sustaining its spare physical energies, of cleansing its receptacles and arteries (of giving to each cell its due), of procuring for itself a coherent reference to natural elements are hardly met. (Figure 22)

It is no surprise then that surrounded by foul play the individual mind reacts against any diminution of its right to self-determination. The pathetic thing is that this right has been wrapped for so long in a physical knot of chaos and irrelevancy that only a tenuous and ill flame still burns there.

If there is any question about the inevitability of a society of man that will carry the individual to his personal fulfillment, there is no question of the inevitability of a superorganism of a thousand minds that will ecologically cradle such persons; it is the city of tomorrow. In such a superorganism the individual brain will have a collective counterpart: the non-biological memory archive and logical decision-maker, the computer. Then there will be a triad: the central physicochemical brain and peripherally the individual brains, each in turn hosting individual minds. (Figure 18)

The morphology of the city will be determined by this epidermic distribution of wills, the mind of the city, composed of thousands of peripatetic particles all operating from individual brains. In addition to this multiplicity of wills posturing themselves in collective veneers oriented toward the light (see the vegetal kingdom), there will be a centralized brain of non-biological character (unless technology allies itself to biology and medicine and brings computer science back to the ancestral father—the organic).

The phenomenon then of the city, a congruent, humanized micro-universe sustained by the neonatural layer (Figure 13) (the physical structure of the city), is an ultracomplex organism whose centralized brain is the instrument that works for the satisfaction of the thousands of epidermal individual minds bound together by forces of sociality and culture.

12. Arcology: The City in the Image of Man

Figure 19: Islands, Barriers, and Scattered Limbs

Figure 20: Wholeness and Flux

The concept is that of a structure called an arcology, or ecological architecture. Such a structure would take the place of the natural landscape inasmuch as it would constitute the new topography to be dealt with. This man-made topography would differ from natural topography in the following ways:

It would not be a one-surface configuration but a multi-level one. It would be conceived in such a way as to be the carrier of all the elements that make the physical life of the city possible—places and inlets for people, freight, water, power, climate, mail, telephone; places and outlets for people, freight, waste, mail, products, and so forth. It would be a large-dimensioned sheltering device, fractioning three-dimensional space in large and small subspaces, making its own weather and its own cityscape. It would be the major vessel for massive flow of people and things within and toward the outside of the city. (Figures 15, 16) It would be the organizing pattern and anchorage for private and public institutions of the city. It would be the focal structure for the complex and ever-changing life of the city. It would be the unmistakable expression of man the maker and man the creator. It would be diverse and singular in all of its realizations. Arcology would be surrounded by uncluttered and open landscape.

The concept of a one-structure system is not incidental to the organization of the city but central to it. It is the wholeness of a biological organism that is sought in the making of the city, as many and stringent are the analogies between the functioning of an organism and the vitality of a metropolitan structure. (Figure 18) Fundamental to both is the element of flow. Life is there where the flow of matter and energy is abundant and uninterrupted. With a great flow gradient the city acquires a cybernetic character. The interacting of its components erases the space and time gaps that outphase the action-reaction cycles and ultimately break down the vitality of the system. (Figures 19, 20)

These are mechanical but fundamental premises for a functioning metropolitan life. In reality the idea is that of a very comprehensive plumbing system for the social animal, which the city is. The plumbing system consists of the previously mentioned man-made topography. (Figure 48) Social, ethical, political, and aesthetic implications are left out, as they are valid and final only if and when physical conditions are realistically organized.

To dispel the aura of cerebralism or utopianism from the concept presented, there is another way to see the central problem of the city: The degree of fullness in each individual life depends on the reaching power unequivocally available to each person. (Figure 21) In turn this reaching power is in direct proportion to the richness and variety of information coming to and going from the person. Information means not only sounds, sight, and so forth, but all the sensorial data, all the physical intermediaries that make any sensitivity possible; all kinds of inorganic, organic, organized, or man-made matter or material or instruments, from foodstuff to wireless, from toilets to television, from mothers’ reprimands to theater. This wholeness of information must include packaged and remote information such as television, radio, telephone, and the communications media, as well as environmental information. Environmental information calls in the technology of transportation, distribution, and transfer, and calls for the no less fundamental quality of the environment itself.

This combination of remote and synthetic information and environmental information is indispensable to the nature of metropolitan life. In physical terms it means that the distances, the time, and the obstacles separating the person from all civilized institutions have to be scaled down to the supply of energy available to the person himself.

If we inject into the picture the sheer bulk of products and devices wanted by and forced upon each man, we can see the dimension and the absolute priority of the logistic problem. The burden of matter, part of the environmental information weighing on every man, is impressive and also irrational. This matter has to be transformed, manipulated, moved, serviced, stored, exchanged, rejected, and substituted—the warehouses of arcology will have to be enormous. One thing nomadism has not been able to teach us is frugality. (Figure 22) What is the mechanism by which the rich and complex life of society can flow back into the structure of the city?

In a society where production is a successful and physically gigantic fact, the coordination and congruence of information, communication, transportation, distribution, and transference are the mechanics by which that society operates. It is not accidental that these are also dynamic aspects of another phenomenon, the most dynamic of all: life.

In every dynamic event of physical nature the elements of time and space, and thus acceleration, speed, and deceleration, are crucial. The speed of light, a space and time shrinker, well serves the communication of information of the packaged kind—television, radio, telephone—the synthetic information. Thus a good supply of synthetic information can reach even the scattered suburbanite (for him environmental information is and remains monotone, bone stripped).

Figure 21: The Reach

Figure 22: The Waste

The picture is totally altered when we come to transportation and distribution. Unless the feeding in and feeding out of these two is highly centered and axialized, the laws of matter and energy will see that sluggishness and possibly stillness prevail. Swiftness and efficiency are inversely proportional to dispersion. Scattered life is by definition deprived or parasitic. (Figures 24, 25) This can be verified by approaching the problem from the opposite end. The environment is vital and living information; it is the bulk of information available to man.

Blighted environment is blighted information. The cause of blighted environment is the breakdown of environmental information occurring when there is no follow-through from synthetic information to transportation, distribution, and reach. When this occurs, the energies of the individual are exhausted in the struggle to keep the avenues of environmental information open, to keep the flow of things going. (Figure 19) Man’s mechanically low-grade energies are absorbed, not euphemistically, by cement, asphalt, steel, pollution, and all sorts of mechanical, static, and dynamic barriers in an ever-enlarging frame of space and time. The flow becomes sluggish, it does not come to a standstill. (Figure 23) This blighted environment is a direct consequence of sluggish or dying flow.

Impaired flow is ultimately the disproportion between the validity of the individual reach and the amount of energy that is expected to make the reach possible.

One may thus say that because of the biophysical makeup of our world, rich flow—that is, rich potentiality—is the direct consequence of minimal separation between components. Minimal separation between components cannot be achieved by using only two or three coordinates of space. Minimal separation between components is structured three-dimensionality, or it is not feasible. The solid and not the surface is the environment where adequate flow is possible, thus where environmental information is rich and where life can flourish.

The surface of the earth, for all practical purposes, is by definition a two-dimensional configuration. The natural landscape is thus not the apt frame for the complex life of society. (Figure 24) Man must make the metropolitan landscape in his own image: a physically compact, dense, three-dimensional, energetic bundle, not a tenuous film of organic matter. The man-made landscape has to be a multilevel landscape, a solid of three congruous dimensions. (Figure 25) The only realistic direction toward a physically free community of man is toward the construction of truly three-dimensional cities. Physical freedom, that is to say, true reaching power, is wrapped around vertical vectors. (Figure 20)

There is a further and reinforcing reason for verticality. As individuals we act horizontally and need horizontal dimensions up to six to ten times the vertical dimensions. Thus, the compactness and richness of social collective life can be found only vertically. (Figure 26) Around vertical vectors, megalopoly and suburbia can contract, moving from flat gigantism toward human and solid scale. (Figure 23)

If this concept is valid, as it seems to be in view of the nature of the physical and energetic world, then a dense urban structure is mandatory, regardless of the what, how, where, or when. A few generations of men reared and grown in an environment badly stripped of cultural and aesthetic scope may be sufficient for the brutalization of society. Signs that such brutalization is already at work are abundant and impressive. If man is quality against quantity, then the priority is clear. It is much too late for our present generation, bound to the spell of arrogance and license. It may even be quite late for the just born, but there is hope for the children of our children. The when is now, for lack of any reachable yesterday.

13. The Characteristics of Arcology

A passenger liner is the closest ancestor of arcology. The common characteristics are compactness and definite boundary; the functional fullness of an organism designed for the care of many, if not most, of man’s needs: a definite and unmistakable three-dimensionality.

Three main characteristics on the other hand are not common: the liner is structurally and functionally designed for motion within fluid; the liner is a shell for a temporary society of unrelated people; the liner is a sealed package connected to the outside only by way of synthetic information. Relieved of these three tyrannies, the liner, the concept of it, can open up and, retaining its organizational suppleness, become truly a machine for living, that is to say, a physical configuration that makes man physically free.

We have then architecture as the materialization of the human environment and ecology as the physical, biological, and psychological balance of conditions that account for the specific site and its participation in the whole.

Figure 23: The Automobile Mystique and the Asphalt Nightmare

Arcology becomes the cleavage of the human in the body of matter and life, probing for the ever-changing condition of the present in a manner congrous to the aestheto-compassionate nature of man (see Aesthetogenesis).

Arcology is then that architecture so complex in scope, so sound in structure, so infrastructurally subtle and pliable, so comprehensive, and of such miniaturizing force as to alter substantially the local ecology in the human direction.

Arcology is then, morphologically, that of the man-made (I will call it neonature), which parallels in one an ecology and an organism—an ecology in scale, pervasiveness, and balance, an organism in complexity and dynamism; skeletally, a structure of such dimension, scale and organization as to be favorable to the interplay of the forces by which man and society grow; functionally, a compact, dense, and efficient organization caring for the intake, processing, storing, consuming, expelling, recycling of the elements needed by the complex life of man and society; humanly, an apt shelter for the multiple expressions and longing of man as an individual and man as a society; formally, a foundation for the aesthetogenesis of nature (into neonature).

If, for the sake of clarity, one separates the not-too-separable instrumentality from the scope (ends) (Figure 38), one may say that the instrumental purpose of arcology is the definition of a well-rounded service system which, cutting into the waste of time and space, presents man with a few extra years of positive time, time to use to his personal, social advantage if he so pleases. That this may be invaluable lies in the assumption that life is precious enough and unique enough to demand rightly the best environmental conditions for its flowering and that coercion and frustration are inimical to life. Life is coerced by the environment man has produced and lives in. It is basically coerced by the very fact of the physical conditions he himself has compounded. (Figure 19)

The time-waste brought about by space-waste (functional and structural) by force of physical laws, including fatigue, results in cultural pauperism; thus, a waste of life at the level where such waste is unwarranted and unreasonable. (Figure 22)

The achievement of the instrumental purpose of arcology coincides by force of physical laws with nature’s conservation. The coincidence, which is also a reinforcing element in the qualitative scope of the life developing within the arcology itself, is a direct consequence of the identity of efficiency (in its full meaning, frugality) with axiality of life. Then instrumentality in its over-all power is vital to efficiency and thus, indirectly, is itself vital. (See Miniaturization.) But the fruition of growth is in things that are not commensurable to that which would seem to be their cause. Wile an apple is the fruition of a tree seeking continuity in the next apple tree, and in a sense all that is the new tree was already in the parent tree, the fruition of man is the creation of the never been before and never to be again.

At the same time the observation that life has never been so rich is invalid in the two directions of ratio and history. The ratio fulfillment–wealth seems to dwindle constantly. This indicates an ultimate exhaustion of human values submerged by and in a mechanism of ever-powerfulness lost to man’s purpose. Historically, the stage of affluence seems more a leveling of, rather than a stronger stimulus to, growth, as if affluence were at the same time cause and effect of a weakening in the thrust of evolution. Totalitarianism recognizes, or instinctively senses, this and capitalizes on it by putting ideals before affluence and in so doing, though possibly for the wrong reason, injects new purposefulness into individual motivations.

The mechanisms channeling life positively may consist of the replacement of comfort and security by joy. In joy, motivations are carried, uplifted, while in comfort and security they seem to be drugged, sinking into naught. Possibly when wealth would instrumentalize a joyful state instead of a security at any price, the negative side of conservatism. Joy comes from plenitude. Plenitude, though basically an inner condition, can be invited by an inspiring and stimulating environment and the feeling of working toward achievements that overreach one’s own limitation and embrace not just oneness but otherness as well: therefrom, the fruitions of creativity.

The pertinence of arcology to the condition of man, the condition of joy or indifference, is direct and immediate. Joy is then the burst of liveliness that comes with the fitness and coherence of a process that is developing under one’s eyes; it is the opposite of senselessness and squandering.

14. The Wastes

Figure 24: Life as Varnish

Figure 25: Life as Flesh

The boundless squandering of the wealth of the earth is compounding all the other already harsh conditions and may produce a civilization without an earth to host it. One by one, in the short time of two to three generations, ecologies, fruit of eons of refinements, are destroyed. The degree of destruction seems to be in direct proportion to the amount of wealth and power; thus a dismal forecast of even greater destruction. (Figure 1)

The biological wisdom of an agricultural civilization has no parallel in technocracy. The frugality of the former has been followed by an irresponsible redundance. Nothing in scale, wealth, energy, and impact can equal the menace of technocratic urban and suburban sprawl. There, waste is a compound from the field of geography, agriculture, materials, energy, functionality, biology, and mind. Arcology is opposed to all of this. (Figure 22)

Geographic Waste Among the most hospitable and gentle lands, increasing acreage is taken by the chaotic fervor of real-estate and other enterprises, even when urban premises are absent and not forthcoming. The action, based on profit, automatically dissipates the premises, the serenity that was there. Even a real motivation would not prevent destruction unless predicated on long-sought care.

Farmland Waste Farming centers are becoming huge suburbias by means of speculation and illusion; again, total destruction of that which was the reason for the intervention of man, the fertility of the land.

Material Waste The atomistic nature of suburbia plays the sweetest song to the production madness of free enterprise. Nothing is indeed sweeter than raping nature and getting dollar bills in return, with its concomitant exhilarating power. Forests are transformed into cheap lumber, then cheaper shelters, from wilderness to slums in a matter of half a generation. Oil deposits are depleted in a few years by one tenth of the earth’s population for more than questionable ends. The same goes for everything else, from floors to roofs, from pavements to poles, from engines to tires, from printed paper to napkins.

Functional Waste The unnecessary reiteration of purely functional activities, mainly of a maintenance nature, robs the whole of its wholeness. One may think of an organism trying to exist with thousands of weak hearts frantically pumping fatigued blood through inadequate, sclerotic veins, thousands of livers, thyroids, lungs—there vegetativity at its passive worst would be miraculous.

Biological Waste It goes hand in hand with functional waste: a fractured landscape, poisoned and scorched vegetation, dust fumes, hot pavements, combustions, animal species displaced or destroyed, pollution reaching as far as rivers go—disruption and destruction of ecologies.

Energetic Waste The linkage to suburban cells, forever inadequate, is forever wasteful. The car, by no means the only case, is a good instance. (Figure 23) One sixth of the whole U.S. working force exists to keep wheels rolling, to say nothing of road building and maintenance. This alone is a terrible indictment of the sterility, grossness, and cruelty of our civilization. The whole thing assumes a gory and savage aspect when we add the 50,000 deaths per year, the countless crippled, the countless family wrecks, countless mental wrecks, and all the care, assistance, hospitalization, rehabilitation. The car is now a brutal and mesmerizing instrument, both physically and mentally.

The saddest aspect of waste on the energetic side is that no matter how much we produce and install in horsepower, kilowatt hours, gas mains, fuel tanks, coaxial cables, the linkage is inevitably far too tenuous for a truly complex and vivifying society. True life cannot be spread that thin. (Figures 21, 47)

Mental Waste Independence gone, variety gone, nature gone, good air gone, uniqueness gone—the frustration in discovering that one’s actions destroy the reasons for the action itself; instead, isolation, confusion, artificiality, ugliness, pettiness, and cultural death. If waste, meaning greed, callousness, and foolishness, is to be confined to a reasonable residual, action is in order, from the detail to the whole. The former deals mainly with an improved psychosomatic coherence between the individual and his acquired ability to telescope problems in their dimensions, spatial and historical (education). The latter is the relevance of this spatial historical dimension itself. It is arcological in the sense that it provides answers only if faced comprehensively and nonsegregationally. The configuration of society must change in its material as well as immaterial aspects. The two must fuse into one another. (This is achieved only through an aesthetogenesis.) To be sick of one’s culture is a well-kept tradition. But the explosive power of things at hand now is unprecedented, and the tide of an instinctive, robot-automatic neonature, overwhelming the biological instincts, is being sown among us by ourselves (against ourselves).

15. Man on Earth

Figure 26: Apes and Men



All the preceding observations strongly suggest that physical clustering must prevail over scattering. One might say that scattering consumes its power in the act of scattering and, like shrapnel, brings death with each of its fragments.

Clustering activates by compression, and the media undergoes a change of state. It etherializes; that is what the good city has shown through history.

Nothing could be sillier than telling people they must cluster. Besides, people have definite ideas about overcrowding, functional asphyxia, freedom, taxation, urban crime—nor would they accept being herded forcibly into wild experiments. The smallest degree of leadership should see through the urgent plight of an exponentially decaying environment to the need for bold investigation-experimentation.

The arcologies presented here are in their abstractness an effort to suggest new approaches to urban dilemmas. In each arcology it is necessary to distinguish the concept, which one hopes to be valid, from the personal sound with which the concept is invested. The concept could be said to be the skeletal structure in its most abstract terms. Personal style would be the formative beginning, that is, the broad outline of a formal investiture of the organism; hence the acceptance, or not, of the idea, separable from the acceptance, or not, of its aesthetic side. (Beware of literal deductions.)

To position the meaning of arcology so that the hindrance of the present becomes proportionate to the relevance of the problem, some observations are necessary. Their generality should not distract from the truth that the energies of man cannot validly be directed against man or mankind. Man’s struggle is within and somehow against a basically indifferent universe. (Figure 55) In it the phenomenon of life is inexhaustible inasmuch as and as long as it is miraculous. The bleeding of man at the hand of man in a fragmented earth, short of any hypothetically pedagogical value, should be matter for wonder and revulsion to all of us.

Figure 27: The Borderline is a Complex Membrane



The Physical Premises

The size of the earth is given and, grossly speaking, unchangeable (in the time cycle of civilizations at least). The ratio acreage–man is shrinking rapidly on a planet rich in land of a forbidden nature, at least for a long time to come. Gravity is an overriding force, perpetually governing the logistics of man-matter on our earth. Climate, seasons, and day-night cycles are ecological realities and, as such, worth cherishing.

The Biological Premises

The energetic rules of life designate most or all of the fertile land for foodstuff production at the greatest rate of real efficiency. The ecological balance of the whole planet is predicated on nonamorphisms, that is, on differentiations. (Figure 54) the functional equilibrium of the whole is in the dynamics of micro-macro interactions and in the fluid character of the total media. The earth surface is not a woven fabric but a pluriaxial, relevance-studded, hollowed-out bas-relief and it will become even more so (Figure 25) lest an indifferent and undifferentiated mold takes possession of it. Under a microscope the mold would reveal itself as pervasive suburbia. (Figure 24) Biologically, the warm-blooded mammal, man, short of major and numerically relevant genetic alterations, is a sun-and-air animal, a surface, land or sea animal. Moving upward towards the rewards of sensitivity, the living organism reaches for compactness. Full tridimensionality of the biological seems to be the prime condition for psychological fullness, so that the venture in time is sustained by rich parameters, manifold articulations, and relays. (Figures 15, 16) On the contrary, dust and filaments reflect only tenuous action and no sensitivity toward whatever may be at bay. (Figure 47) As it is for nature, the sur-nature of man finds liveliness, resilience, and a chance to complexify only in full tridimensionality and in the wealth of a sustained duration. (Figure 46) Man operates horizontally. The field of his direct, constant influence is an extended space limited by two horizontal planes six to eight feet apart. As a consequence, the most direct, shortest, most efficient, compact, economic, and organic composition for the interaction of many men, of society, is vertically oriented, perpendicular to the plane of action. (Figure 25) Complexity, the stuff of life, requires functional denseness. Logistically this is obtainable only through organizational frugality—compactness.

Figure 28: Compassionate Man and Statistical Universe

The Reflective (Individual) Premises

A double pull works on man: (1) The pull of what has been, mainly prehistoric animality; therefore the primeval urges, the leasing of one’s self to the omnipresent whole, the terror in it, the exhilaration of muscular prowess, instincts, joys, and fears in a cosmos that is so awesome. (2) The pull of what will be, weightless in its nonexisting form, arbitrary at the low price of its fancying, dogmatic, drained as it is of the sap of reality, and artificial.

But man is prey to a much more real artificiality. He is always leaving nature, seeking the haven his mind prods him into seeing there, just around the last vestigials of the unconscious and vegetative. Leaving nature behind proves to be blood, tears, and even more, squalor, quite possibly all unnecessary.

The fullness of man’s life may lie in the balance between instinctive longing that reaches down through the flesh of ancestry and an intellectual unrest that seeks an etherialized universe. Thus, man is positioned at the welding point where at the one window nature and wilderness are sight and touch, and at the other is the mechanism of the man-made, displaying bold forms, sympathetic shelter, and a wealth of care and power for the human condition. (Figure 27)

If society is able to put man on his borderline of nature and neonature (one displaying its unlimited and tale-telling structure—the other, a superstructure, the new world man is creating) and keep him at the same time as a vital citizen, it is there at the cleavage point that man, the lonely individual, may seek and find identification.

This identification translates physically into the container of his life and work, the home, in the whole and in the details such a life uses and expresses. Within it also is uninterrupted sowing for a richer present.

This means that, if so inclined, the individual should be his own master builder. The fruits of technology will afford him this (see Leisure). Better education and a harmony-oriented society would be strong guidelines, channeling his expressions away from cleverness toward qualitative coherence. This coherence is fully colored by his own personal sensitivity but reflects whatever the body-social has given him and is now articulated by him and reinserted as the infrastructure of society (the city).

This is his contribution to the transfiguration of such structures into form (see Aesthetic Universe). Neonature man is rooted in the earth landscape and seascape. The wealth and strength of his flight is founded on the consciousness and in the sensing of such rooting, on the nursing and care in him and around him of that which is earth oriented.

Figure 29: The Man-made: Neonature

The Social (Collective) Premises

The social superorganism, contriving and nursing mores, culture, and destinies, lives within the physical, social body. Its metamorphoses are not sequences of obsolescent skins and interior gadgetries but the slow or rapid emergence of the new from within the historically real. (Figure 28) The practical as a frozen likeness of the real is obsolescence. A function of the real is to confine the practical to its function of lubricant in the cogs of the evolving present. Then the structure of the body-social is slowly invested with the flesh of humanness, and its form disengages itself into freedom. The skeleton (structure) finds deliver from immobility through the supple exercise of the whole muscle-flex system, the superstructure. (The real thus becomes aesthetic and defies obsolescence.) (Figures 33, 35, 38) So it is that the present may loose the brittleness of a flaking plane (obsolescence) separating an estranged past from a foreign future and may become instead the powerful thrust of an engrossing past pressing against that which is not yet.

This shows the need for a spatial tridimensionality of large proportions (arcology) capable of letting life run throughout in every direction in conspicuous flow and in warm surroundings, with the energies stored in it by not-obsolescent past; only this flow can carry and power the dynamics of ever-changing reality. (Figure 50)

The Instrumental(The Technological World) Premises

Defining neonature as all that was, is, and will be man-made, a nature filtered and manipulated by man’s mind and hands, this neonature can be grossly divided into two kinds: the instrumental and the aesthetic. (Figure 38) A third, as residual from the two not in size but in meaning, is extravaganza. (Figure 29) As in the blackest black an element of whiteness still persists and in the whitest white an element of blackness, so the pure technological does not exist any more than the pure aesthetic.

The technological could be defined as the substructure of the aesthetic which is essentially formal, that is tosay, the superstructuration engendered by man’s compassion on the structure of existing things. Compassion in this context I regard as the fire that makes the purely just overreach itself into the genuinely human. Form would thus be the overreaching of structure. By this, structure finds its own full significance. As the universe is structure, the purpose of life is to take hold of it and help it to find its meaning, its form. Man is the eyes and the ears of a blind and dumb universe.

At the hinge point where structure interlocks or transfigures into form, and partakes of both in function and meaning, is the crafted—that neonature that more aptly shows by the biotechnical character of its form the ties man has with nature, while at the same time indicating clearly the resort of the species to artificial instruments and media for extending its control and manipulation of things instead of the constant development of new somatic tools. There is no symmetry between the two kinds, nor is craftsmanship constantly the separative or connective third kind.

Figure 30: Science-Technology Cycle

Figure 31: Craft

Figure 32: Extravaganza’s Involution



The situation can be illustrated by a man with no tools and determined to make an object for a gift.

The man has an idea, and feelings brush and whisper around him, an everyday condition. If a particular material or object was the starting point for the making of the gift, the man will try to act upon it according to what he knows to be its character. Thus, working in the nature of materials, the man works at least potentially as a craftsman. (Figure 31) If the idea is the dominant factor and its expression occupies his attention almost entirely, the man at least potentially acts as an artist. (Figures 32, 33) The material will be more of a choice from necessity rather than preference. (It will be a reference.) Here then is the man and the intention as the avowed object (the fairly irrelevant category of such object: spoon, portrait, carriage, still life…). The man needs an intermediate element that will permit his action (energy) to modify that material or object, if as a craftsman he had made the choice or if he tends to proceed as an artist. Whatever the medium, man must make an instrument. He proceeds by tooling himself, and with the use of his energies or borrowing them he will then act. (Figure 30)

In embryo, one has the craftsman and/or artist borrowing from the technologist the instruments he needs, the means of achieving a definite end; man, the knife, and the carved splinter.

Is this sequence a yardstick valid beyond the elementary of the situation? If in the situation man is the demiurge and if he must keep this position no matter how complex the parameters may become, then this elementary pattern has universal validity. If this is so, our civilization is in mortal danger. What is happening is that the man got so wrapped up in the making of his tool (man the maker) as to lose view of the aim—the gift (man the creator). The giving, not the making of a tool or the selling or the bartering, is the unmistakable sign of caring, and the weight of the giving is in the nonobsolescent value of the gift.

The reason why the refrigerator or the TV set is not the gift is not because it is still an end to a means; the handmade spoon is so, too. It is because they are only a means to an end. Life rejects, as it must, as fundamentally irrelevant everything not directly and physically touched by the care of man (that is, the combination of intelligence, vision, compassion, and human awe peculiar to the species). That which is not so touched is and remains purely instrumental and indeed marginal to the fiber of evolving man, no matter how complicated and stringent its walled-in rationality. The substantial irrelevance of instrumentality is hard to grasp when man himself suffers from the same lack of finality or sacramentality. (Figure 34) The tool and the gift are heterogeneous in the sense that the soil and the fruits are in the natural world, or better, as the physical and biological rules are relevant to the fruition of life—relevant to life but meaningless as soon as life itself is canceled by the real. Their relevance is one of functionality, not of meaningfulness.

Figure 33: Aesthetogenesis

Technology is instrumental neonature. (Figure 38) In it structure and function are overriding conditions, and their unadorned presence is the best sign of efficiency and coherence. But no amount of efficiency (good design) will keep the instrument away from the annihilation of obsolescence. Indeed, obsolescence is the sure measuring scale for the validity of neonature. All of neonature that is obsolescent is instrumental, and the rate of obsolescence measures the decay of its validity. (Exception is made for those tools that are direct extensions of man’s biological structure: the spoon is a good example, footwear, sight devices…) All of neonature that is not obsolescent is aesthetic. In a more encompassing proposition one may add: Of all that which exists, nature and neonature, the aesthetic is that part and only that part of neonature which is not obsolescent (hence the distinction between the beautiful/natural and the aesthetic neonatural).

The validity of the instrumental is its functionality within historical terms (one minute–one century). It is because it functions. Aesthetic neonature creates its own validity by its mere existence. It functions because it is. In the environmental field, neonature of the instrumental kind is construction (obsolescent). Neonature of the aesthetic kind is architecture (nonobsolescent). Physical permanence is not a pertinent aspect.

Architecture becomes ecological when a scale and complexity explosion occurs, and the sheer physical proportions of the organism, together with the potentiality of the life within, become an ecological determinant. Society must decide if the environment is purely instrumental (obsolescent) or if it has to contain in itself a different validity: aesthetic. It must be remembered that the aesthetic is not the absence of the functional but the shrouding of it with the compassion of man (a person).

Figure 34: The Dead End

The aesthetic shroud is not an overcoat but flesh, that is, a vectoriality—permanently meaningful. This is why it has to be compassion, not whim, or greed, or fear, or bigotry, or hypocrisy, or arrogance…. A structuralized environment is a skeletal configuration in quest of a form (the aesthetic shroud), and unless this quest is given full opportunity, the society living in such a skeleton will be willfully forfeiting its human prerogatives and putting itself in the lap of a protohuman rationality. The end of the road is the total robotization of the species. What is more and, in short, worse, is that the skeletal condition being fundamentally repellent to man and life, man himself tries to camouflage the dried bones with fanciful dresses. This is fraud at its classical best. Its whimsical moments cannot conceal the utter squalor of which it is cause and effect in one. Extravaganza is involution. The anguish, deeply buried or clearly exposed in the work of art (all of them), is an almost biological consciousness of this living death pervasively scattered over the earth, overpowering by sheer mass and idolized by stultified life. This is the dark future with a technology for technology’s sake, and the many grim pictures given in literature will never convey the total nightmare of its advent. (Figure 34)

Figure 35: The Etherialization

The Aesthetic Premises

The common confusion of the aesthetic with the extravagant makes it difficult to try to convey the relevance of the aesthetic. At best, it is considered a pleasant superfluity, helpful for a status-seeking frame of mind, one of the amenities of life. Any effort to make of it something more is futile unless its place is found in the center of historical life.

As nothing survives time but that which is essential, the aesthetic is not a worthy burden to carry on unless it is the burden of life itself. The core of life is aesthetic.

The burden of life, its underbrush cared for, is the grasping of a universe statistically driven, finding its structure (science), retranslating it in rational terms (will-technology), and superstructuralizing it into a form in the image of man. Man’s intensity shapes the natural world into the instrumental world to the point where the critical temperature reached, a metamorphosis of the instrumental, makes it into an aesthetocompassionate universe. (Figure 35)

The aim of man is an aesthetocompassionate universe: aesthetic, compassionate, the two aspects of the living at its living best. The living is only the living best. The rest is the aura of a past no longer pertinent. There is in the Western languages an undeniable indication of the central position of the aesthetic in the life of man: the beautiful, il bello, le beau, el hermoso…; it is in any and all fields the ultimate qualification. It is as if the redeeming power of the aesthetic could redirect even the most evil of evils toward a positive pattern.

16. Residual Anguish

Figure 36: Residual Anguish

Access from the structural to the formal is possible only by leaping over all the structural, logical, and just diaphragms when they prove themselves inept because their presence does not disentangle the state of anguish that preys on the individual. The residual anguish that does not abate in the comfort of the rational, the logical, the just is a residual that life carries in itself as the pressure of an immense megamachine, all-enveloping and all-powerful, to which life is a dependent and fragile filiation. (Figure 36) The megamachine is the physical universe. The rules of the physical universe are not benign to man because the stuff he is made of is soft, delicate, impermanent and because performance in life is dependent upon very few gauges of all the unlimited substance of the physical.

The combination of powerful mental processes and the utter precariousness of living tissue cannot but produce this residual anxiety, impervious to all attacks if one excludes faith in a providence instituted by a divine guidance.

Residual anguish demands a resolution that can be found in the hands of a God or that can be created by the mind and the hands of man. In the absence of an extrahuman faith, the alternative is the metamorphosis of the real by the aesthetic act. By way of it inward-bent anguish mutates into outward-moving compassion, carried and fused within the formal substance of the creative.

The aesthetocompassionate act bends the structural reality of space-time into a rarefied condition governing itself through ultrastructural, formative forces. (Figure 33)

The aesthetic, not being descriptive, cannot be explained (described) from without. It can only be from within itself. In this exclusiveness is the wholeness of the aesthetic performance.

In a sense, that which can be described (translated into a new media) has not reached the outer limit of its own realm and is constantly awash in the surf of obsolescence, as if the lack of a containing and fitting membrane had made the content easy prey to the enormity of the total envelope, the megamachine.

The aesthetic conclusion is a secure harbor where the mental stuff can shelter particles of itself in wait for the last sweep of fire that will weld them together into the ultimate form of reality, a reality of which evolutionary man is a partial and historicized image.

17. Leisure

Figure 37: The Individual Emergence

This may all be well—but what about starvation, pauperism, slavery, and ignorance, so widespread, so cruelly overcasting human life? Any effort in any field is doomed to frustration if it is not guided by a thrust into the pattern of the future that not only makes sense but is also dynamic. Action is sterile without a vision that makes it real and engrossing. The fuel of action, short of being truly compassionate, is counter to life, unhuman. The disheartening slowness of any progress toward freedom from need is mainly fruit of a greed out of proportion to any justifiable fear of insecurity.

To make matters worse, there is the misplaced exhilaration of man when presented with an extraordinary amount of power that opens the door onto countless rooms cluttered with hypnotic, shiny, utterly fractured things.

The rationalizing ability of man would be amply sufficient, even redundant, for a rapid elimination of his ills if only he could distinguish the contingent and the precarious from the permanent and humanizing. By so doing, man would adhere to the essentials (not the skeletal only, nor even the extravagant). Short of total savagery, all men will one day be biologically relieved of need, that is, not just free from physical need but also free from labor. Equity will be a state of being (Figures 6, 7); on that day man will be able to work. The age of leisure will test his worth, from roots to leaves. It will be unqualified disaster unless a long preparation precedes the year one (almost upon us), preparation of the individual for the tyranny of freedom. (Figure 37)

Sloth, rationality, or aesthetogenesis will then be the three choices, because lurking in the folds of indifference will be the manipulators of sloth-man; because in the ticking and shrieking of a synthetic world will come, electronically, the mating call of sexless rationality; or because the dedication of man, the individual, and society will work at the aesthetogenesis of the world. A subtly organized technology, mostly automated, a less fearful hominidae firmly holding the reins on the awesome monster, and a better notion of what a humanized ecology will be, will make the solid piers from which will be launched the fantastic journey into the not-yet-created.

Figure 38: Means and Ends

The metamorphosis of man the maker into man the creator will be fostered by transference of the making to automation—technological neonature—and by the involvement of liberated man in the creation of an environment in his own image: man, the creator; aesthetic neonature, his creation. (Figures 33, 38)

We see the tide of boredom investing society at her affluent best, leaving on her lap a litter and waste of persons, bodies, and souls. If we are not able to spark the imagination of man with powerful vision on those points where power is clustered manyfold (the city), we miss, not peripherally but totally and centrally. This is the responsibility of power, and the shrinking from it is an irresponsible act.

18. Procedures

Figure 39: The Phoenix

The decision to undertake the construction of an arcology will rest on the prime premises of experimentation: the investigation, to be carried out to its conclusion, of an urban problem framed within an arcological conviction. This is the experimental phase common and inevitable in any pioneering venture. A very feasible and significant step in this direction would be the participation of ten to twenty major business corporations in the development of a superstructure containing the home office of each, plus residential facilities for personnel, laboratories, and the necessary cultural ingredients. This would be a pilot city of arcological momentum.

Once the experimental phase had furnished guidelines, arcologies could be conceived for specific programs. A refusal to face this necessity and pay the price for it will result in an accelerated decline of the urban tangle and a rapid decay of civilization. This direct interdependence is what we have tried to illustrate in the preceding pages.

Figure 40: The Tornado

Examples for the arcological approach :

The failure of an existing urban center to rally and recapture its needed vitality induces urban authorities to plan a step-by-step withdrawal of the social body from the condemned town. This could mean a dislocation of the whole population away from the old site. If the site has proved obsolete or nefarious per se, a more suitable site may be chosen. If not, the arcology can spring out from the discarded shell (the town). In the long run this latter situation may prove to be the wiser choice. It would rehabilitate a depleted site while carrying a continuity into the process. It would clear the rubble, restore a few structures worth preserving, and would not take a new parcel of land away from the environment. (Figure 39) A starting condition of houses scattered haphazardly, as in pioneering communities. This amorphous condition spreads with centrifugal acceleration (the community is growing ). A need and a demand for a centripetal counterflow is solicited by the stiffening caused by such scattering. A critical level is reached when the necessity and the demand for convergence becomes dominant. The idea of an organism is injected into the critical status condition. An (abstract) archtype, the arcology, helps to establish a structure. At the critical moment, when the change of state will occur from scattered atomist to centered organism, the abstract structure is put aside, the pertinent morphology is conceived and gradually realized. In accelerated motion one would see something like a benign tornado uprooting one by one the loose cells of the town, clustering while transforming them on a functional axiality, leaving at the feet of the new town a large space for the rehabilitation of nature as it may fit the needs of the citizens. (Figure 40) The recognized need for limiting the expansion of an existing urban area, expansion that will end in the destruction of the city itself. A new center (arcology) is conceived to care for developing activities and increasing population. Mining, quarrying, or other similar undertakings have left a large scar on the body of the land. Its idleness and ugliness, the danger it represents as an ecologically regressive factor—soil erosion, floods, depletion of wild life—are demanding a healing action. A vacation center, a health center, or research, or culture may be the nucleus of the new city, establishing an ecology of its own, a monument to man’s care. In this case the exposure of the geological backbone would be advantageously used for the rooting of the arcology. (Figure 41) The construction of large or colossal masonry works for specific functions—dams, tide breakers, retaining walls, chasm bypasses, superhighways, watershed diversions, waterways, river control—are combined with the creation of new urban centers, arcologies of opportunity. In each of the listed cases a great mobilization of resources has been needed: science, engineering, power, power machinery, and labor. Furthermore, all kinds of utilities are brought into use: roads, railroads, landing fields, water, power, telephone. The sites, more often than not, are beautifully endowed. Finally, there are the colossal structures themselves, bold but lifeless. The organizat