12/2/2009 6:20:00 AM Soleri takes architectural concepts to China From Arcosanti to Beijing
Arcosanti architect Paolo Soleri's rendering of what his design for a Lean Linear City would look like. Two parallel "urban ribbons" house people and businesses. The Beijing Center for the Arts invited Soleri to display his work and be keynote speaker at the center's exhibit, "Three Dimensional City: Future China."
Courtesy/Arcosanti Archives
Chinese artists and engineers put the finish assembling a 36-foot long 3-D model of Arcosanti architect Paolo Soleri's Lean Linear City design. The Beijing Center for the Arts invited Soleri to display his work and be keynote speaker at the center's exhibit, "Three Dimensional City: Future China." The glowing area highlights the "urban ribbons" that would house residential and commercial centers.
Courtesy photo/Tomiaki Tamura
World-renowned architect Paolo Soleri and his Arcosanti staff traveled to China for Beijing Center for the Arts' exhibition, "Three-Dimensional City: Future China." Soleri discusses his Lean Linear City architect designs today as the keynote speaker.
"Yipeng Jiang, vice director for the Beijing Center for the Arts, visited Arcosanti (located near Cordes Junction) in August to get some background information on Soleri's work in linear city designs," said Sue Anaya, Arcosanti archivist. "Originally, he was going to have a small role in their exhibition because he is one of the early pioneers in alternative architecture.
"But once she got here and saw the depth of his work, she got really excited and the museum decided to devote an entire floor to his design and asked him to be the main speaker."
The museum, located on Tiananmen Square in the former U.S. Embassy, is displaying a 36-foot-long by 5-foot-wide 3-D model of Soleri's Lean Linear City architect drawings. His books and drawings about containing urban sprawl - some dating back to the 1960s and earlier - are gaining more recognition as countries such as China are devouring agriculture land to build more cities.
"Three-Dimensional City is poised to envision an ideal living environment and future urban ecology," a spokesperson for the museum wrote. "The project addresses the depletion of land and energy resources."
Soleri, a former student of Frank Lloyd Wright, started his career near Scottsdale in the 1940s. He designed homes that combined architecture with ecology into what he calls "arcology."
He designed and built Cosanti in Paradise Valley, and Arcosanti near Cordes Junction as large-scale arcology habitats. His designs include passive solar heat, photovoltaic solar power and water recycling systems.
Chinese artisans and engineers built the gigantic 3-D linear city model from computer blueprints created by Arcosanti staffer YoungSoo Kim. After Jiang returned to Beijing in August, Kim developed a CAD (computer aided design) program and electronically transferred his computer renderings to the Chinese museum staff.
The 3-D model replicates Soleri's linear city design drawings, which cover a 67-foot-long scroll.
Soleri's idea for a lean linear city is to cluster housing, shops, schools and hospitals - an entire community - into two parallel multi-level structures called "urban ribbons." A "green ribbon" of parks and waterways winds between the parallel structures.
The city layout is designed to reduce urban sprawl across the landscape, explained Erin Jefferies, Arcosanti publicist.
People would travel throughout the city on foot, moving sidewalks (such as those at airport terminals), on bicycles or by light-rail systems. High-speed rails would connect cities with each other.
"The idea is to bring the farmers to the city, and not take the city to the farmers," Anaya said. Soleri designs linear cities to use solar and wind power, recycle water, and grow crops in massive greenhouses.
"It's an elegant way to contain growth so that the environment can be left to farming and open space," Anaya added.
The City of Scottsdale commissioned Soleri, who turned 90 this past June, to build a 22,000-square-foot plaza and 110-foot-long pedestrian bridge at Scottsdale Waterfront.
"Soleri argues that the world cannot sustain the social, environmental and economic costs of urban sprawl," Jeffries wrote. "The idea resonates more in China because they are faced with an increasingly demanding population and resource issues."
To learn more about Soleri and the "Three-Dimensional City" exhibit, which runs Nov. 29 to Feb. 28, visit www.arcosanti.org.
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