Ghosts of Futures Past: Arcosanti

Alex Steffen over at WorldChanging shared a passage snipped away from his upcoming book which he’s now pruning and polishing. If something this beautiful hits the cutting room floor, I can only imagine how stunning the book that remains will be. I’ll admit to prejudice, though. Arcosanti has been a focus of wistful imagination for me since I was a little kid, like Paris is for some people. I still mean one day to see it, and despite the sadness of Steffen’s piece there’s quite a lot in what he says that renews my eagerness to check it out myself. Here are a few tastes of the larger piece:

“Arcosanti… is now funded almost entirely through the sale of bells. It is essentially one big crafts guild. Which is a fine thing to be. Indeed, sitting there in the evening light, with birds chirping, and [a] young potter smiling my way, I can see the appeal: fuck it, let's all throw aside our worries and make bells. It'll be a good life. But it's not the City of the Future. [Actually, this seems to me among the pleasanter plausible futures I can think of, this side of the goo bestiary.]....

“We continue our walk. We pass a couple apartment buildings. The buildings themselves are a bit weathered and, well, not my architectural preference (very 70's, very blobject, very Planet of the Apes), but they are well-designed (they all employ passive solar, many have "sky theaters" built into the roof for sitting out and viewing the stars at night). The public space is great. There's an amphitheater with a waterfall running down the middle of the seats.... Sometimes the entire community gathers at night on the roofs of buildings overlooking the canyon, and lights are shone against the cliffs of the other side, and dancers perform in front of them, sending huge shadows writhing on the basalt walls....

“Arcosanti's half life is long over, and it is headed for it's own tiny heat-death. Sure, it's still growing, but the vision and the reality have too long diverged, and my sense was that the True Believers needed desperately to convince themselves that the dream was still alive. Maybe it is. Who am I, really, to say otherwise? Let them build their utopia in the desert, if they can pull it off.

“But Arcosanti isn't the future anymore. It smells too much of museum dust. It's the embalmed husk of a future, and a future that's older than I am, at that. I get in my car, and drive back down the rutted road, and wonder if I'll find some fresher dream ahead.”

A lovely piece, thanks to Alex Steffen for sharing it!