From: Barbara Lamar (altamiratexas@earthlink.net)
Date: Mon Jan 01 2001 - 11:52:01 MST
At 11:44 AM 01/01/2001 -0500, Greg Burch wrote:
>My first near-adult ambition was to be an architect and seeing Soleri's great
>big beautiful book about his ideas in the late 60s (or was it the very early
>70s?) for the first time was one of the great aesthetic experiences of my
>life. However, I've come to a position of deep skepticism about the basic
>premise of the arcology since then.
I too had youthful ambitions to be an architect, and in fact I went up to
the 5th year courses in the School of Architecture at UTexas. One of the
things I had the most trouble accepting in design courses was city
planning, which was all the rage in the late 60's and 70's. I, too, loved
Soleri's ideas (as well as Frank Lloyd Wright's idea of parklike cities)
but knew from experience that large-scale urban planning probably wouldn't
work in practice and that, in fact, tightly planned cities would probably
be boring to live in (at least for someone like me who enjoys impromptu
happenings).
>The fundamental issue I take with Soleri's conception of an arcology is its
>reliance on central planning and a priori decisions about over-all urban
>design.
Same here. However, I like to think of the principles being applied at the
level of, say, a shopping mall (which would then become much more than a
shopping mall) or an industrial complex. These projects are tightly planned
from the beginning anyhow.
Barbara
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