I visited a strange brutalist-ish structure in middle Arizona. I went in with annoyance and anger, knowing the founder had molested his daughter for many years and her story was not told until a few years back, and not mentioned at all in walking through the place as a visitor. You’d think a revelation like that would be plastered on every wall in today’s culture, but no, you’d never know he also made advances to his artistic subjects, or took advantage of the free-labor volunteers that made his dystopian visions come to life. I looked at his design concepts for other cities, all of them esoteric and strange, inherently corralling and limiting people and their freedom to sprawl, own things, and be happy. I theorized that his penchant for phallic designs had a specific source in his controlling and evil spirit that would so abuse his daughter. It sickened me that people still go, spend money, invest in the philosophies of a now-dead man who contributed nothing to the world but fresh ways to subdue its people, starting with the most vulnerable person in his life. I spit fire as I left.
There are better ways to city. Than Phoenix especially, I’m sure. Ever-outward urban sprawl is tough to deal with, especially if the city center is struggling and the outward surge takes the tax base with it (hello to my over-simplistic understanding of 60’s-era Detroit, minus the racial motivations). But is the answer shoving people into cubicles, underground factories, continuous elongated shopping malls with skylights eighty feet up? I’ll never forget my speech professor saying, “I’m fine with parties. But after a while, I’ve gotta get outside and breathe previously-unbreathed air.”
Concrete and metal structures never age well, and they are ugly to begin with. The clean lines appeal in concept, but because life is dirty, and oxidation happens, and bugs crawl and rain falls, the model cities only gleam at 1/250 scale. The real thing? Rusty, dirty, crumbling after only a few decades. Because building something beautiful that would last forever was never the intent. It was to tear down the old simply because it was old, not because the new was better.
As to the efforts to define arcology as “architectural ecology”, the architect’s own definition defies the rebrand: square on the drawing, “arcology: the city in the image of man.” Name of the concept city? Babel. Could his predisposition to God-defying ideology be more obvious? I found the site sadly comical, desperately clinging to relevance, selling its own bells tolling its fate as it fades into the desert. I honor the effort of every artist and volunteer craftsman who gave their time to this unworthy effort, and there were cool elements that were unlike anything I’d seen before, but I fundamentally disagree with everything the original designer stood for, so… impossible to advocate for his results.
If people saw you as a genius and were willing to flock to your model campus and build whatever you wanted for free, what would you build? What architecture says “I am one with the earth as a fellow creation of God, and am also responsible to steward and subdue it”? That nature is not God, and not the boss, and not to be abused? How do you raise the earth like a child?
You must love it (the earth and its creatures), and people. If you claim to love the earth and hate people, people die. If you abuse the earth and claim to love people, the earth dies. And it doesn’t have to be that way. Anyone who says people are the problem is, themselves, the problem, because people are the greatest resource this earth contains.
There are beautiful art pieces here that inspire thought and demand presence. They were made by people, free people, the very thing many architects over the years have wished to contain and condemn. I will not go back, but am glad I went.