Soleri’s futuristic designs recognized needs of the Earth

Published: Saturday, April 20, 2013, 9:00p.m. Updated 31 minutes ago

It's hard to know what to make of architecture's dreamers.

Famous turn-of-the-century futurist architects like Tony Garnier and Antonio Sant'elia designed cities of the future, but rarely built anything themselves. Yet they are studied by city planners, architects and students even up to today.

It will probably be that way with architect Paolo Soleri, the dreamer in the desert, who died at his home in Arizona on April 9 at age 93. Soleri was the guy whom Buckminster Fuller who ought to have known once called one of the greatest of the dreaming strategists.

Soleri only built about a half-dozen structures for others in his life, but he became famous in architectural and planning circles in the 1960s and '70s for his elaborate drawings of what he called arcologies, compact one-structure cities that might house anywhere from 5,000 people to a million or more. Some were floating mega-cities, some were bridges across canyons, some just rose in his imagination from a plain.

He was pictured in an architectural magazine of the era, a slim and wiry man, sitting in just shorts and sandals in his own earth-sculptured house outside of Phoenix, drawing out these cities on vast rolls of butcher paper.

These were renderings that Ada Louise Huxtable, the late architecture critic of the New York Times, later described as some of the most spectacularly sensitive and superbly visionary drawings that any century has known.

He is most often mentioned today for a 40-year-long effort to build a micro-arcology called Arcosanti out of earth-formed concrete in the Arizona desert about 70 miles north of Phoenix. Working with students and apprentices in a sort of hippie-camp atmosphere, he completed only about three percent of the planned mega-structure over four decades. But he was rarely troubled by the slow pace of the work. He seemed more concerned to call attention to the idea than to worry about completion.

Soleri was born in Italy and came to the United States in 1947 to study with Frank Lloyd Wright. He eventually created his own desert home in Paradise Valley, outside of Phoenix, across from Wright's home and studios at Taliesin West.

He had a significant connection to Pittsburgh. His wife, who died in 1982, was Corolyn (Colly) Woods of Sewickley, daughter of a prominent Pittsburgh insurance executive, Lawrence C. Woods Jr., who as a member of the Allegheny Conference was one of the leaders of the first Pittsburgh Renaissance. Soleri and Colly met when he designed and he and she worked together to build a retreat in the Arizona desert for Colly's mother, Lenora.

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Soleri’s futuristic designs recognized needs of the Earth