Customer Reviews

Arcology: The City in the Image of Man

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If you can imagine a future where cities cover every bit of earth's available space (think LA everywhere), then you can also imagine an alternative. Whole cities inside massive structures of incredible design, leaving most of our precious land open for us to enjoy and treasure. Paolo Soleri envisioned such cities and his drawings will inspire you and spark your imagination of what could be. Imagine cities that float on the sea or stretch across canyons and you will get the idea. Architecture students or just about anyone with an imagination will be amazed by his designs. I hope to live long enough to see one of his massive structures built.

This book contains amazing illustrations and is highly imaginative. However, I must give it a one-star review because its pretentious author would have readers believe that he singlehandedly divined a set of new-age principles (incomprehensible to any reader, since they're inadequately explained and loaded with neologistic jargon) that he calls arcology (a word that, as its ending -ogy should suggest to any English language speaker, refers to a "study" or set of principles - NOT to structures themselves, which are properly called "hyperstructures").

I have a master of urban and regional planning degree from an accredited program at a major (big 10) university, and please let me tell you that the text of this book is pure "pseudoscience." It is designed to impress people who don't know science, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Soleri has some legitimate cultural and designs criticisms (after all, who doesn't?) but he tries to merge these with inscrutable mystical gibberish, and he delights in creating lots of impressive-sounding words as he pretends that these words actually connect with scientific concepts. They do not. If you don't believe me, then just try to find any textbook of psychology, sociology, ecology, biology, etc., etc. that actually fits with his ravings. You will be able to confirm for yourself that Soleri is writing from his own individual mental creation, and that his notions of an organic city are not grounded in any of the research that people have actually done - he's creating from his own mind a set of organic analogies that he imagines will tie into a unified, organic whole. That is all totally in isolation from practical, achievable planning, ecology, etc. and doesn't tie in with any actual research. This book is an exercise in science-fantasy by a wonderful illustrator (who put his architectural background to good use in the wonderful illustrations here). It must not, however, be mistaken for anything else. It is a new age vision, a work of science-fantasy. Apart from a few of the well-known environmental concerns it expresses, the text of the book is basically a work of total fiction, with almost no authentic theoretical grounding whatsoever. For more authentic writings on environmental and early urbanist planning and design, please refer to Ian McHarg's "Design With Nature," and writings/designs of LeCorbusier. Their ideas are actually practical, implementable (Brasilia's design came from LeCorbusier's ideas), and connected with the mainstream. Urban planning is still a pretty young profession and this book is an unfortunate example of pure hubris - although beautifully illustrated and imaginative, its text should be recognized as equivalent to the "circle-squarers" in math, or homeopathic herbal remedies, or any other false-"science" designed to fool and impress those who don't have the training and the guts to call label it publicly as the nonsense that it is. This book is the basis of a utopian cult, and has nothing at all to do with actual science. Soleri's writings should not be treated as those of a prophet. He is a wonderful artist but a highly confused thinker. But that's the sort of thing that a lot of people believe to be a normal part of religion, it seems, and so this book has attracted a religious type of following, in which it is either swallowed (or not) as a matter of faith rather than treated properly as a mere set of ambitious hypothesis to be tested and refined. Instead, many people tend to assume that something that sounds complicated actually makes sense, but then don't want to admit when they themselves can't really get a rational understanding of it (people are afraid to seem ignorant or incorrect) and so the result is that every now and then, someone churns out a bunch of half-baked ideas that people revere instead of question, and then a cult forms. There is definitely a small Soleri cult that has formed around this book. People should recognize that although Soleri was creative, he was also an ultimately irrational thinker. Either that, or, like L. Ron Hubbard, he decided that the way to promote cultural change was to form a new religion. This book clearly goes beyond ecological and design considerations and presents a lengthy statement of a religious perspective, as posited by Soleri in a form he felt could draw from and capitalize on existing cultural concepts (everything from the big bang to the second coming). It's statement of faith is to offer the achievement of utopias of his own design. The problem is, Soleri hasn't a clue about authentic SOCIAL organization and problems (as any authentic text on Urban Planning, Sociology, etc. will be able to point out), and instead he dishes out heaps of mystical, idealized jargon with the idea that it's somehow actually feasible simply because it expresses his own personal ideals. Meaning: he wants it to be true - it's his own personalized utopian vision - and as such it is irrelevant to him that he often employs purely mystical speech to indoctrinate readers into his artificial notions of an organic, holistic, grand unified theory of everything. In the process he redefines and adapts popular phrases from both science and Christianity and creates a boiling stew of visionary gibberish. The time to call this what it is is long overdue. Pretentious hubris. Creative and enjoyable, certainly, but unfortunately a form of narcotic that ensnares the gullible and confuses them about authentic principles of well-grounded authentic research and theory - and planning!

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