Chapter 2
My
First Arcosanti Workshop: Spring, 1975
The
Octagon
Dawn-light lit the Octagon as
Arcosanti folks gathered for Morning Meeting. People streamed in
through the doors. Quite a few people at Arcosanti in spring, 1975,
and the Octagon was crowded. People sat on the interior steps,
talking, sipping coffee from plastic cups and smoking—smoking was
allowed in the Octagon in those days. I went over to the orange Gott
cooler to get some orange juice. Some people sat for the meeting,
others stood in a circle around the interior perimeter of the
Octagon.
The
Octagon is so shaped because its design is based on Arcosanti’s
original design as it is presented at the end of Paolo Soleri’s
book, Arcology:
the City in the Image of Man.
This first “castle” design incorporated a number of
twenty-storey, forty-foot octagonal housing columns. The Octagon in
Camp is half the height (eight feet) and the same shape and diameter
of an individual housing unit inn those columns. The interior of the
Octagon in Camp has a concrete floor with a ledge around the
perimeter, falling into a stepped pit in the center. A large steel
open fireplace dominates the room. The domed roof is wood, topped by
metal. The Octagon comprised the center of activity in Camp. We ate
in there, socialized there, held meetings and slide shows there.
On
the left of the north door of the Octagon is a large bulletin board
that is crammed with postings. In spring, 1975, these included an
article from a psychology journal which said that humans, unlike
mice, really can live in very dense environments like the arcologies
of PaoloSoleri. The article featured, to our satisfaction, a photo of
a model of Paolo’s Hexahedron
arcology. A couple of topographic maps of the land around Arcosanti,
roughly framed in painted plywood, hung by chains against the wall.
As Morning Meeting convened,
leaders of the construction program welcomed the new Workshop group
to Arcosanti. They explained the ongoing construction of Arcosanti
and described some of the construction techniques used on the job
site. They discussed the purchasing of materials and the management
of the Camp and Kitchen. People often laughed during these
conversations, and I soon learned that there was a variety of people
at Arcosanti, varying in age, background, and attitude. Morning
Meeting was frequently long. There was a lot to discuss, but Morning
Meeting wasn’t all serious: in addition to talk about hard-nosed
construction business, people read poetry and told jokes. But still,
I found it just astonishing, during one of the Workshop’s first
Morning Meetings, to hear Mary Hoadley the “Go-pher” announce
that she was “totally into gossip” and wanted everyone to share
their gossip with her. That remark certainly stuck in my mind…
Since
other were always reading or reciting things, perhaps to keep
everyone’s spirits up, one day I recited from memory a passage from
Paolo Soleri’s book, The
Bridge Between Matter and Spirit is Matter Becoming Spirit:
“The
evolutionary process is a process of interiorization of reality into
the consciousness, albeit the re-creation of itself. The spirit is
this consciousness is action, the action being the making of ever
more centered, imploded, complex, miniaturized wholes.”#
During our first Morning Meeting,
the new Workshop group was divided into teams that would be working
at various tasks on the job site. I was assigned last—I think
no-one was sure what to do with me but I was offered a position on
the “re-bar” crew. I asked what this involved and was told that
“re-bar” is steel reinforcing rods that must be placed in the
wooden form work before pouring the concrete. Doing the re-bar work
involved cutting, bending and tying re-bar with steel wire in the
wood form work for concrete. I accepted the assignment, and the
meeting finally adjourned. We hiked up the Hill to the construction
site on the Arcosanti mesa where a small compound of structures was
already built, including the South Vault, the most impressive one.
During Morning Meeting, at dawn in
the Octagon, there was iced tea, coffee, juice and rolls to sustain
us until breakfast was served up on the job site. Around 8 or 8:30
a.m., the Kitchen crew trucked breakfast up the Hill from Camp, in an
old white pickup truck that was affectionately known as
“(S)Tinkerbelle.” Sometimes the truck had to be pushed to get the
engine running. When it arrived up on the site, everyone took a break
from work to eat breakfast, which was served on the slab for the
floor of the North Vault. People sat on the concrete ledge at the
South Vault or on the pre-cast concrete sections laying where the
North vault would, eventually, be constructed.
Breakfast at Arcosanti included
the best granola I have ever eaten. Whole grains, peanuts and
almonds, a granola so rich it turned the milk brown! Sometimes
scrambled eggs were served along with rolls, iced tea, coffee, juice,
and water. Breakfast was supposed to last only thirty minutes but
some people managed to stretch it to forty -they were sometimes
reluctant to get back to work after relaxing so much. A few hours
later, the Kitchen crew trucked up the Hill again, bringing lunch in
the same fashion. Lunch fare varied quite a bit, from sandwiches to
Tofu soup, homemade vegetable soup, or chili with meat.
The structures of the Arcosanti
compound on the mesa are built fairly close together. The rocky
Arcosanti mesa faces a small canyon on the south, called the
Valletta; an opposing mesa rises before it. When I first arrived at
Arcosanti, the fresh concrete of the buildings shone in the sun. The
skylight frames of the new Foundry apartments were striking in their
unusual configuration. The South Vault soars over the center of the
site; to the east, there is a stunning view of the valley below and
the mesa country beyond. Today, that land comprises the Agua Fria
National Monument. In the distance, Sycamore Mesa rises from the
landscape like a desert ship.
In the early 1970s, the Cosanti
Foundation had an agreement with a neighboring rancher: he could
graze his herd of white Charolais cattle on Arcosanti’s property.
The cattle were large in size and number, and they were everywhere.
They would graze on the slopes of the mesa opposite the site, they
would move up the Agua Fria river bed in huger herds, creating quite
a spectacle.
Shortly after we arrived at
Arcosanti, the staff gave our entire Workshop group a tour of the
Camp. Part of the tour was a hike up the Agua Fria River bed. We
walked along the stream that comprises the river most of the year.
The guide gave us some history of the Camp and surrounding area. We
walked as far as the ranch buildings. I was surprised to see houses
built in the canyon, on the river bank. Before Cosanti Foundation
bought this land, it had been occupied by a working cattle ranch. At
that time, some of the rancher’s family still lived in these
houses, north of the site. The guide stopped us and said, “These
are nice people but they don’t want to be disturbed.” He told us
we were not to approach the ranch buildings at all; that we should
just stay away from them. Seemed a little rude, to me, but I did was
I was told, and hardly went near them.
The Arcosanti workshop program
grew out of the original “Silt Pile” workshops held at Cosanti
during the 1960s. The last of the Silt Pile workshops at Cosanti
overlapped with work at the Arcosanti site. The early Arcosanti
workshops enlisted hundreds of people who first constructed the Camp
below the mesa site and then began construction of the arcology
itself.
Life at Arcosanti during the early
years was molded by life and work in the wilderness of the high
Sonoran desert. The Camp sits on the south bank of the Agua Fria
River, under spreading canopies of large cottonwood trees. It is,
quite simply, an oasis in the desert. Occasional thunderstorms in the
mountains surrounding Arcosanti cause flash floods to run down the
riverbed, often in the opposite direction of the flow of the river.
The first structures to be built
at Arcosanti were in the valley below the mesa on which Arcosanti is
situated. The structures were work shops, a public building, and a
kitchen. The site of the Arcosanti arcology itself is a mesa near a
southwest corner of the 860 acres owned by the Cosanti Foundation.
Some 3000 acres of leased forest land abut the Foundation’s parcel.
The site was chosen in a calculated way, primarily for its proximity
to the north-south highway traversing central Arizona, Interstate 17,
and because north of the mesa is the Agua Fria River Canyon. The high
desert mesas surrounding Arcosanti form a plateau with mountains on
three sides: The Bradshaw Mountains to the west, the Mogollon Rim to
the north and the Mazatzal Mountains to the east. The predominating
vegetation is desert scrub and mesquite, with prickly pear cactus
scattered about the landscape. Cottonwood and Palo Verde trees grow
on the river banks, mesquite covering them. Watercress can be found
in some of the pools of the Agua Fria River. The terrain is rocky;
the mesas of basaltic rock have been eroding away for millennia,
Several
structures have been built on the mesa of the Arcosanti site since
ground was first broken in 1970. The Ceramics Apse, a studio for
producing ceramic bells and tiles, and the South Vault, part of
Arcosanti’s town square, were constructed first. The Foundry Apse
followed soon after. Crafts III, a multi-use building with retail
food operations, a gallery and apartments was constructed between
1972 and 1977. Its unusual architecture, funky construction and
counter-culture atmosphere made Arcosanti seem like something
straight out of the Whole
Earth Catalogue.
The Arcosanti Camp, situated on
the floodplain of the Agua Fria River, is laid out in a rather
sprawled manner. Plywood City and the Octagon occupy the easternmost
end of Camp, next to the river bank, while the west end is where Cube
City or “Cube Town” is laid out. In 1975, the lack of trees
around the Cubes meant that Cubers (Cube-dwellers) were unshaded. The
aluminum sunshade structures had not yet been built over the Cubes.
On the southwest side of Camp are the Big Cube—a sixteen foot Cube
and Double Cube sixteen feet long by eight feet high. These are prime
spaces in Camp, for those with the luck or sufficient seniority to
get them. West of them is the communal bathroom building, with
toilets (in stalls), sinks, and a shower. In modern times, the
bathroom building has a solar greenhouse built on its south side,
providing heat in winter. Stone pathways connect the various areas of
Camp. There are also clusters of Cubes built alongside the river
bank, west of Plywood City, arranged around common patios. Arcosanti
residents who have stayed on past their workshop period occupy these
Cubes. In 1975, each Cube in Camp was occupied by two people.
At this time in Arcosanti’s
history, there was only one telephone on site. It was located on the
mesa in the East Housing Drafting Room and Construction Office. This
was the space complementary to the new Library in West Housing. Years
later, these large spaces were converted into apartments; I lived in
the east one for three years in the late 1990’s. But in 1975, the
telephone was kept busy with construction business and was deemed
off-limits during the day. On weekends, this office was locked. After
work, the office was open until 4:30 p.m.; you had around 45 minutes
to get there to use the phone for a short call. I sometimes made
collect calls to my parents back in Cincinnati. Often, Workshoppers
and residents trecked to Cordes Junction, on foot or by car, to use
the pay telephones outside the Chevron service station.
Rebar
Hill, 1975
On the job site, the main project
underway was the silt-casting of panels for the new North Vault. A
very large wooden formwork or template sat at the back of West
Housing, built to the dimensions of the North Vault panels. The
template held previously-cast panels, in between thick layers of
silt; sitting on top of those was another bed of silt for casting
three more panels. A crew of workers directed by red-haired Jack
Blackwell pushed a large wood screed back and forth across the silt
to shape it for the next set of concrete castings. The silt layer was
painted later with Paolo designs (including patterns made from
asphalt roofing material), which would appear on the ceiling of the
finished Vault. A stack of pre-cast concrete panels rose to the west
of the form work for the Crafts III building. The Foundry Apse was
still under construction and crews swarmed over it.
Rebar Hill was a concrete slab on
the rise north of West Housing. There, Ken the rebar foreman
explained to me and another Workshopper how we were to measure, bend
and cut re-bar for the Vault’s panels, which were soon to be cast
below. Ken with his brown beard and long hair was, to me, a
perfectionist, arrogant slave-driver. Next to Rebar Hill was an old
and weather-beaten Tool Shed. There was a sunshade over the slab; the
shade was a wood frame holding a thicket of tree branches. On the
slab was a concrete and steel table with a re-bar bending device
bolted down at the east end.
Ken assigned me the task of
cutting and bending lengths of re-bar, forming them into a curve that
would have to fit the specifications for the Vault panels. He drew a
long curve in yellow construction chalk on the slab, explained that
the bent re-bar would have to fit that curve. My task was to cut and
bend enough of these for the entire set of panels to be poured by the
end of the Workshop. (It turned out later, the chalk line I had to
follow, which Ken had drawn, was inaccurate.)
The weather that spring was cold,
windy, and blustery. There was intermittent rain and snow, which we
braved for the sake of the construction effort, but when it got
really bad, we’d retreat to the interior of West Housing for a
break. Inside, we could drink coffee or tea, talk and relax in the
relative warmth of the unheated room. Outside, at one point the
weather became so brutal and I was so tired of dealing with Ken’s
attitude that I spread my arms, looked at the sky and shouted, “Rain!
Snow!” so that, I hoped, we could take a break. Between the kitchen
and living room areas of West Housing was a long, curving, rounded,
built-in table which, we were told, had been made by a guy from
California who made surfboards for a living. Someone lived in the
balcony of West Housing—a lucky resident who got to live up on the
mesa site. One day, when we couldn’t really work due to the awful
weather (there had been so much snow that everyone just hung around
the Octagon in Camp), Tony Brown invited us up the hill to see snow
on the buildings.
Arcosanti’s elevation is 3.750
feet and there are often high winds, mostly in the spring, even when
it is clear. During the Workshop, in the afternoon when the winds
were high, the crews using the old Navy-surplus crane to lift
pre-cast concrete panels into the façade of Crafts III had to deal
with the 30-ton panels being blown around on their cables like
cardboard. This was scary for everybody.
Safety is a priority on the
Arcosanti job site, as you might expect and hope, but there are some
gaps. The “hard-fats” given out are for the most part actually
plastic hard hat liners, not steel hard hats. People use markers to
put their initials or some design on the front of their hard hat
liners. There have been a few accidents around the site over the
years that have resulted in some serious injuries: some falls from
tall scaffolding; one man was run over by a piece of heavy machinery;
another fell into a fire that was to have been used to burn some
trash – one of his hands burned off.
The
Arcosanti Population
There were between eighty and a
hundred people at Arcosanti in spring, 1975. In addition to the large
crew of Workshoppers, there was a large staff made up of dedicated,
hard-working, interesting Arcosanti residents. Roger Tomalty, smart,
muscular and energetic, was a construction foreman with a degree in
architecture. Mary Hoadley, once a PhD candidate in anthropology at
Stanford, Roger’s companion, had the title of “Go-pher,” and
was always running around, making notes in an orange Rhodia
notebooks. Mary drove the large pickup truck to Phoenix at least
once a day, to do construction purchasing and errands. Paula Wittner
ran the Camp Kitchen—a big job—since it was the only functioning
kitchen on the site at that time. Paula is an artist; she produced
large paintings showing groups of matronly women in print dresses,
staring out of the frame. She painted a sign for the Camp, with the
women admonishing everyone to “Bring Back Your Cups!” British
architect Tony Brown was a leader at Arcosanti, second in command to
Paolo himself. Tony is smart, dedicated and enthusiastic. His family
had joined him at Arcosanti, including his wife, Pam and his young
son, Jason. Pam would do errands in the vicinity of Cordes Junction
and Mayer, including the daily trek to Arcosanti’s rural route
mailbox at the Junction. Pam’s errands also took her all the way to
Prescott, thirty miles each way.
The intense shared experience of
living and working at Arcosanti made for a close social bond among
the workshoppers. I counted as friends among fellow
Workshoppers—civil engineer Ralph Kratz from Oakland, Margot Bausch
from Chicago, Bebe from Corpus Christi, Chaz Davis from Indiana,
Janet from Illinois, my fellow roommates in Plywood City, one of whom
was a rather odd guy who went around talking about a concept he
called “Direct Democratic Adhocracy.” This was a political and
technological theory of governance by legislation and elections via
computer networks—an idea far ahead of its time in 1975.
Another practice ahead of its time
at Arcosanti was recycling. Most everything there was recycled or
re-used in some way. Aluminum cans, glass, paper, and cardboard were
taken to the recycling centers in Phoenix. Some used wood was re-used
to make formwork for concrete pouring. In the first early days,
unrecyclable plastic was buried in an unsanitary landfill in the Camp
area. Then all recyclable plastic was set aside, collected and taken
to the recycling center. Non-recyclable trash is still put into
Arcosanti’s construction-sized dumpster to be taken to the county
landfill. Overall, trash is minimized by conscientious effort.
Our first week at Arcosanti, Paolo
Soleri returned and held court up on the mesa, in a
question-and-answer session in the Ceramics Apse area. Afterwards, my
friend Margot told me that Paolo is charismatic, but also haughty and
arrogant. I thought, with all of his accomplishments, Paolo had a
right to some personal stature. Today, after having worked closely
under him for twelve years, I’ve come to think Paolo is a tad more
arrogant than necessary. At another meeting with Paolo, this one in
the unoccupied West Housing, a crowd of people crammed into the
apartment. Ken, a physics major, challenged Paolo’s belief in the
Omega Point in terms of astrophysics.
My fellow Workshopper Margot and I
became good friends and we had fun talking about Arcosanti and our
surroundings in the high desert of central Arizona. Margot was tall
and a little overweight, with long dark hair and an intelligent face.
One day, she took me aside, walked with me to the hillside of the
Arcosanti mesa, away from Camp. There, she explained to me that she
was a lesbian and that I shouldn’t expect anything from our
relationship. I said I didn’t care; that was her business. A year
or so later, while I was away at the Grand Canyon, Margot visited my
parents in Cincinnati; she hadn’t known I was at the Canyon and was
looking for me. She told my parents Arcosanti was too much like a
religion for her. My parents, later, when they told me about her
visit, contradicted her story about her lesbianism. I still don’t
know whether this was an accommodation to my parents on Margot’s
part, or if she made up her original assertion so that I wouldn’t
come onto her. Her statements and behavior during our later trips to
Los Angeles and the Grand Canyon bear this out – but as I said, I
never really determined for sure.
That spring, during our Workshop,
a large group from the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer
Isle, Maine, came to Arcosanti to conduct their own Workshop. The
infusion of women into the largely male Arcosanti population made for
a pleasant balance. The Haystack group’s emphasis was on ceramics.
It was understood by the Arcosanti staff that they were to produce
items for the Arcosanti project, such as sink basins, tiles, door
handles and so on. Haystack was also to build two new kilns next to
the Ceramics Apse studio. After they arrived, the Haystack group had
a long meeting with Paolo and his lieutenants in the Valletta,
against the mesa opposite Arcosanti. As I understand it, there was
some disagreement between the Haystack participants and Paolo over
the definitions of “crafts person” versus “artist.” The
Haystack participants insisted that they were artists, whereas Paolo
contended they were not, ostensibly because they did crafts works.
Certainly some of the Haystack people thought they were going to do
their own work, rather than Arcosanti-related work.
One
conflict that has endured at Arcoanti has been one arising among the
very creative people there, about Arcosanti-related work and their
own creative work. Virtually no private business has yet been allowed
to develop at Arcosanti, with the exception of the early Café
at Arcosanti.
In the late 1970’s, there was a ceramics artist who did unique
ceramic dragons and wanted to start his own ceramics business at
Arcosanti, using the Ceramics studio’s infrastructure, bur he was
discouraged from that. Some people have done beading for profit,
others, for example, massage. Beading work, drawings, photos and
ceramics have been displayed and sold, first in the Arcosanti
Gallery, then in a small Residents’ Gallery, with Paolo’s
permission. But no independent business of any size has yet developed
other than the Cosanti Foundation and Cosanti Originals.The Arcomart,
a mall enterprise that is managed by a resident, sells sundry
personal goods like soap and fruit juice, soda and chips, is actually
an arm of the Café, hence of Cosanti Originals.
The general Arcosanti population,
and the group from Haystack, were examples of how, especially during
the 1970’s (known as Arcosanti’s heyday), Arcosanti drew much of
its participants from the counter-culture. Much of the Arcosanti
population were or had been genuine hippies—hard-core
counter-culture followers (and leaders). They had long hair, dressed
in blue jeans and flannel shirts, as did I. (I even had a pair of
striped railroader’s overalls.) They had done things like
hitch-hike across the country, or live in the Haight-Ashbury district
of San Francisco in the late 1960’s. They were drawn to Arcosanti
by its pioneering spirit and by Paolo’s hard (concrete) stand
against the excesses of American culture. Back in Cincinnati, my
friends and I had just been city-fied teeny-bopper hippies. At heart,
I was more conservative in my attitudes than I let on, even to
myself. Many of the hippies at Arcosanti were older than I, and I was
amazed by these more experienced counter-culturalists. But some of
them were self-righteous. I was ridiculed by a girl in the co-ed
bathroom because I used Crest toothpaste instead of Tom’s of Maine
organic brand (I was previously unaware of Tom’s of Maine). The
girl claimed all commercial toothpastes had sugar in them. This is
patently untrue.
To quote my friend Lori Gilcrist,
with whom I worked at Arcosanti for seven years:
“One
thing about Arcosanti that is unique is that actions and beliefs
outside of the acceptable norm in the world at large are tolerated
because the overall ideas upon which the place is based are ‘on the
edge’ themselves. There are people there who go further in acting
upon perceptions or beliefs than they would in another context,
simply because they can.”
Most of the people I knew at
Arcosanti were content with its progress at that time, but there was
dissension in the ranks. Master welder and long-time Arcosanti
resident Mark Soloman was unhappy with the then-current direction of
Arcosanti and threatened to leave. That was significant because he
had been a leader in this close-knit community. Mark posted on the
Octagon bulletin board a statement to the effect that Arcosanti had
lost “The Edge.” Pam Brown put up another typed note titled,
“More on the Edge,” asking Mark to stay. “We need you, Mark,”
the note partly read. But Mark did leave, taking a couple of other
people with him. Before leaving, they sang a song at Morning Meeting
to the tune of an old Country & Western song about “leaving
town.”
Work
Changes
Up on the job site, I did pretty
well for awhile, measuring, cutting and bending re-bar for the
project. While I was bending bar on Re-bar Hill, Ken and another tall
Workshopper would go off to work at other locations on the
construction site. I got along with Ken and my co-worker even though
I disliked Ken and his attitude. But then, one morning, for some
reason I just had to straighten up my space in the north bunk room of
Plywood City. When I arrived up on Re-bar Hill, I was late for work.
Ken confronted me, saying that he could not tolerate tardiness and
demanding to know what I had been doing that had so delayed me. I
stood there, defiant: when faced with a confrontation, I tend to clam
up. I didn’t want to tell Ken the simple truth and he finally
proclaimed, “My way or the highway,” gesturing at I-17 in the
distance. We never got along as well after that. That afternoon
following work, when I walked down to Camp, some people approached me
to say they had heard what had happened and I shouldn’t worry about
it—Ken had trouble getting along with others on the staff, as well.
I enjoyed working on re-bar for
the Arcosanti project, carrying the spool of wire and tools on my
belt. I still have a small scar on my right inner wrist from getting
scratched by re-bar wire. In addition to the work we were doing on
the North Vault, we also cut and tied rebar for some silt-cast
pre-cast panels for the façade of Crafts III, and the main (Café)
floor of Crafts III and a part of the stairway below that. Then, Ken
told me that he didn’t need me anymore—someone was needed in the
Garden in Camp.
So I went down the Hill to the
Camp garden and reported for duty there. I worked under a woman named
Kitt, and mostly helped her move flats of tomato plants in and out of
a small greenhouse sunken into the ground in the middle of the
Garden. This was back-breaking labor, bending and lifting the heavy
flats of tomato plants. Outside the Greenhouse, I helped water them
from a hose. Elsewhere in the garden, I helped with the compost bin,
mixing compost in the bin with a shovel, then sifting it so that the
compost became usable garden fertilizer.
The atmosphere working in Camp was
certainly different than it was “up the Hill.” It seemed to me
that ‘city and country’ had already been established at
Arcosanti, with the population of noisy busy ‘city’ people and
machinery on the mesa construction site and the small group of
‘country’ people in the Camp Garden.
A compost sifting apparatus was
located in what is today a large garden, situated halfway between the
Octagon and Cube Town. It was actually a wood-framed screen,
suspended by cables from two A-frame stands. It was quite a task to
stand on either side of the apparatus, holding the screen’s handles
and vigorously shaking the compost in the sifter so that detritus
(bones, etc.) would remain on the screen while fresh compost fell
into a pile below.
One day, while we were sifting
compost, Paolo walked up. He was dressed in his usual white butcher’s
shirt, white hat, blue denim Italian shorts, and flip-flops. He stood
there, watching us work. We said, “Hi, Paolo,” but he just
gestured, saying, “Go on working.” I didn’t understand what a
genius like him could care about the Garden. But others assured me
that he toured the entire work site on a weekly basis.
Daily
life at Arcosanti in 1975, at least during the work week, began with
a bell ringing to waken everyone in the Camp before dawn, Morning
Meeting at dawn in the Octagon, work on the job site up the Hill,
breakfast, work, lunch, work, then free time and dinner in Camp. On
Saturday, most people would go off-site, to Mayer or Prescott to do
laundry and personal errands. People just wanted to escape Arcosanti
for a few hours; which still happens today. On Sunday mornings when
the weather was nice, people would sit on the Octagon’s east patio,
reading the Sunday New
York Times
from the previous week, eating scrambled eggs with peppers in them.
It was very pleasant in the spring when the weather was sunny and
warm.
But
other things happened during my first Arcosanti Workshop. The first
weekend off, I went with a group in Chaz’s car to Phoenix, to warm
up. We shared a motel room near Metrocenter over by I-17, took hot
showers, watched TV, drank wine and smoked pot. I traveled with
Margot on another weekend, with another Workshopper whom we didn’t
know well, on a road trip to Los Angeles, a rather harrowing journey.
Once we drove up to Prescott, the town in which the movie Billy
Jack
had been filmed, and learned that the locals didn’t care for it. On
the way, we passed a Prescott National Forest sign, laughed at the
diminutive scrub forest; the trees were so small compared to those in
the Midwest! In April, we drove up Mingus Mountain and had a snowball
fight—in April!
The fact that between eighty and
one hundred people lived and worked on the Arcosanti grounds meant
that a tightly-knit community had formed. The daily work on the job
site informed most of our Arcosanti experience. Since it was
relatively cold that spring, people would stay in their living spaces
after dinner, or go over to the Octagon (with its large fireplace)
for structured activities. Other community events happened during the
day or especially on weekends.
One evening there was a special
dinner for everyone in West Housing, a reward for all our hard work.
Tables and chairs were set up in the apartment lit by candlelight.
Lasagna was served, along with salad, bread and drinks. Modestino
Conti created the lasagna dish and, in a year or so, would open the
first café at Arcosanti, on the third floor of Crafts III where the
bakery is located today. I sat across from another Workshopper who I
had not as yet met. During our conversation, he said he would never
want to live in an arcology. When I asked what he was doing there
then, he told me he wanted to get a different point of view.
On Easter Sunday, March 30, 1975,
when we went to the Camp Kitchen serving window for breakfast, the
cook told us that we had to find an Easter Egg in the garden and
bring it to the window first. I was annoyed but the woman told me
that “It’s supposed to be fun!” People were already searching
the garden. Apparently people picked up multiple eggs, so by the time
I got there, there were none for me to find. I did find an egg-shaped
stone, which wasn’t good enough. So then the Kitchen staff went out
into the garden and hid a few more eggs so I could find one and get
breakfast. Nice of them! Scrambled eggs and bacon were served that
morning.
Almost
every evening during the work-week, there was some event held in the
Octagon. Living in Plywood City, we were almost directly across from
the Octagon, so it was very convenient to attend these happenings.
Usually there were slide shows or movies as well as lectures,
meetings and parties. It was usually so warm in our Plywood City bunk
room that we were sometimes reluctant to leave for the Octagon. But I
usually went anyway. The Octagon was heated from the large fireplace,
and many people gathered there these evenings. Once, the Arcosanti
staff presented a movie from a sixteen millimeter projector shown
onto a screen. They showed Fritz Lang’s original 1927 film,
Metropolis.
The theme of the movie about the city labor versus management hit
home for the workers of Arcosanti. There had been charges of elitism
and classism between the residents and the administration of the
Cosanti Foundation, and the film seemed to address these issues.
A visiting Arcosanti alumnus
presented a slide talk one evening in the Octagon about Paolo’s
origins in Italy. This guy had actually gone to the neighborhoods in
Torino where Paolo grew up, and had slides of it. Evidently he had
received information from Paolo about this. The presentation was
fascinating. Beforehand, it was announced that this event was for
Arcosanti residents only, not Workshoppers, but some residents
invited me to join them. Afterwards, it was said that this particular
slide show would never be presented again, because it contained “too
much restricted information.” I asked someone—restricted
information about Paolo’s life? Why? I was told, “This is the way
the administration does things.” This was my first encounter with
unspoken rules against “Seeing” too much, and the elitism of the
Cosanti Foundation administration. It is possible that Paolo doesn’t
want this sort of thing because it encourages the “cult of
personality” around him that he is afraid of.
Another evening in the Octagon,
a slide show was presented by another Arcosanti alumnus who had
traveled following her Arcosanti Workshop. She had gone to the
Indonesian island of Bali. She had slides of the beautiful island and
seascape and told a story about how she and her friends had gone to a
beach-side stand to eat omelets with psychedelic mushrooms in them
and then gone out onto the beach to watch the sunset over the ocean.
She also talked about how she had taken ill following her trip. In
her delirium, she had seen the mesas around Arcosanti and knew she
had to return there.
In the early days at Arcosanti,
there was no TV and little radio reception, and we were in some ways
cut off from the world at large. You didn’t hear the news everyday.
Today, some people come to Arcosanti to get away from the media, and
don’t pay any attention to the news (this is one of Arcosanti’s
weaknesses). But some events were paid attention to in the early
days, such as the weather and large-scale world events.
The Vietnam War ended in spring,
1975. One afternoon someone came running into the Octagon to announce
that the war was over! Arcosanti people were stunned at this news.
What we had taken for granted for a decade was suddenly over.
Although on the surface I had always argued against the war, deep
down inside I always wondered why the United States wasn’t winning
it. Someone told me that a lot of counter-culture groups and
activities were organized around protesting the war and the draft,
and now would be a hard time for them. I thought this was ridiculous,
that the value of the counter-culture went beyond protesting the war.
I also thought the counter-culture needed something besides sex,
drugs and rock n’ roll to focus on I thought the Arcosanti
project was just the right project for the counter-culture to focus
on and begin to build anew civilization.
My first Arcosanti Workshop ended
with the first of the now ongoing series of Arcosanti Events. The
Charles Lewis Jazz Quintet from Phoenix performed on the Ceramics
Apse stage. A multicolored Cosanti Foundation banner hung from the
Apse, and Colly Soleri MC’d the event. A small crowd listened and
danced around the Ceramics lawn and the Foundry apartment’s roof.
My Workshop came to an end and it
was time for me to head on up to the Grand Canyon south rim village
for my summer job. Margot accompanied me for a week-long trip. We
caught a ride to Prescott, from where we took the Trailways bus to
Flagstaff. From the Flagstaff bus station we boarded to Nava-Hopi bus
to Grand Canyon National Park. While at the Canyon, we hiked down
into it to Indian Gardens, along the Bright Angel Trail. When we
climbed back up to the Canyon rim, it was snowing at that elevation!
I had to call my parents in Cincinnati for money to get a motel room
before moving into the Grand Canyon National Park Lodges employee
housing. I hadn’t realized the high elevation the Grand Canyon rim
is at, nor did I expect it to be surrounded by pine forest.
My summer experience at the Grand
Canyon was stimulating and fun and a good compliment to the Arcosanti
experience.
