Seeking fresh hope in the 20th-century futurisms of Arizona architectural marvels Biosphere 2, Taliesin West, and Arcosanti.
Before I came upon the ocean in Biosphere 2, I saw its reflection in the glass-and-steel triangles of the massive dome enclosing it. The visual was astonishing: a swelling and sparkling matrix, suspended in a lofty kaleidoscope, apparently stretching to infinity. When I eventually reached an elevated walkway with a view of the water, it was more Sea World than sea. The scummy walls of a 100-foot pool enclosed a pale coral reef swamped with seaweed. Beyond the windows of the Earth systems science facility, built in the late 1980s and early ’90s in Oracle, Arizona, an expanse of Southwestern desert clashed with the sad diorama.
I was on the last stop of a 20th-century architecture pilgrimage in central and southern Arizona, which included Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West and Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti complexes. All three sites were home to patriarchal founders with towering visions of the future that now seem retrograde and egotistical. Their optimism is bittersweet grist for jaded 21st-century tourists.
Humming beneath the bombast of the men credited for these structures are much larger choruses. The people who spilled the sweat to build or operate them in the Sonoran heat are often framed as drone-like disciples or kooky cult followers. However, my visits to these collectively hewn seeing stones offered windows into their true makers’ varied and strikingly topical futurisms.
Biosphere 2
The organism that rules Biosphere 2 these days is the ant. Ants teem across almost every surface of the three-acre facility’s seven biomes, an overstimulating phenomenon that gave my travel companion a nightmare of being swarmed by them. Their frenetic bustle reminded me of the complex’s once-notorious former residents.
In 1991, a multidisciplinary crew of eight stepped under a global magnifying glass when they sealed themselves into Biosphere 2 and tried to keep all of the ecosystems—desert, rainforest, wetland, farmland—balanced. Their mission was to reverse engineer a tiny, closed-system replica of Earth, testing the viability of populating inhospitable planets like Mars. “All of a sudden, the world was breathing down their necks,” said our tour guide, a curmudgeonly fifty-something man. The skeptics started in months before the experiment began, when the Village Voice published an article called “Take This Terrarium and Shove It.”
The founders of the project, Ed Bass, an oil heir-turned-environmentalist, and John P. Allen, a systems ecologist-turned-experimental thespian, leaned into the drama. They’d spent $150 million on the project, so why not turn it into a proto-reality show? “You could buy snacks and coffee and snow cones and hot dogs,” said our guide. “And walk [outside] this place and look at these people that were practically starving, getting one cup of coffee every two months.”
The crew had a difficult time cultivating food (and breathing) due to an oxygen imbalance caused by untreated concrete in the structure’s foundation. They managed to complete their two-year mission, though the best data they gathered was arguably more in the realm of the social sciences. In a memoir, one Biospherian identified humans as the “most unstable element” of the inquiry.
The highlight of my visit was not the surface-level biomes of Biosphere 2… but the tunnel systems beneath them.
A second crew entered Biosphere 2 in 1994, with better prospects: the concrete had been treated, and one of them was a seventh-generation farmer. But a hostile corporate takeover by a businessman named Steve Bannon, an eventual advisor to former president Donald Trump, cut the mission short and cracked the terrarium’s seal for good. The University of Arizona in nearby Tucson purchased Biosphere 2 in 2011 for use as a research center.
The highlight of my visit was not the surface-level biomes of Biosphere 2, which were humid and pungent, but the tunnel systems beneath them. Packed with signposts (“To Desert Basement,” “To Ocean Plenum”), pipe networks (“Rain Water Drain”), and humming machines, the tunnels offered a sense of the day-to-day frenzy of life in this microcosm. A handwritten log on display in the facility reads, “Valve no. 6 is actually valve no. 7, and the controller behaves 100% opposite from what it is designed to do!”
With real-world ecosystems teetering on the edge of collapse, I can imagine a future where documentation of the Biospherians’s passionate—albeit arrogantly anthropocentric—struggle to hold it all together becomes a strange symbol of hope.
Taliesin West
“Just move your chair,” was Frank Lloyd Wright’s purported response to his architecture patrons whose roofs had sprung leaks. Perhaps this is the logical extreme of the near-ubiquitous designer’s philosophy of organic architecture. “He’s designing so that interior and exterior have this flow throughout,” said our tour guide at Taliesin West, Wright’s radically porous Southwestern outpost.
The 80,000-square-foot compound that occupies 489 acres of land in the northeastern foothills of Scottsdale can be viewed as a loosely bound set of experiments, or the culmination of a wildly prolific career. It served as a summer camp—conducted in Arizona’s mild winter months—for Wright’s multidisciplinary creative fellowship, which was headquartered at the original Taliesin in Wisconsin.
Wright bought the land for the facility in 1937, during a late-career lull in commissions caused by the Great Depression. His pitch to potential fellows was to “learn by doing.” “I would compare it to a very hard, unpaid internship,” our guide, a fervent Wright fan in her forties, explained. “[It was about] being immersed in what was going on, teaching to the whole person.”
The fellows designed and constructed shelters on the property, living without running water or electricity.
The fellows designed and constructed shelters on the property, living without running water or electricity. While Wright dropped in and out, a contingent of his team lived there year-round, mixing desert sand, cement, and water to make mortar for walls built from local quartzite stones. As Wright’s particular vision of “desert masonry” rose around him, visually aligning with the slopes of nearby landforms, he worked on designs for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and other iconic structures.
My embodied experience of Taliesin West was of elemental exposure: desert heat leaked through the canvas-and-plexiglass ceiling of Wright’s drafting studio; rock walls scraped my back as we lounged in the parlor; and bone-dry wind whistled through portals due to precisely plotted air pressure differentials (courtesy of the Venturi effect Wright loved).
The tour ended at Taliesin West’s subterranean cabaret theater, the compound’s most environmentally pleasant—and difficult-to-build—room. The megaphone-shaped dugout, which now hosts performances by a local Shakespeare theater troupe, was mostly excavated by hand over two-and-a-half winters. “Once they were done, though, they were so proud of what they accomplished,” said our guide. “It’s almost acoustically perfect in here. You would not want to share any secrets.”
Wright’s most devoted fellows were rewarded for their grueling work, receiving permanent residences at Taliesin West and pursuing successful careers in various creative fields. As severe weather caused by climate change penetrates the built environment around us, the fellowship’s osmotic notions about architecture’s relation to nature feel urgent and egalitarian—despite Wright’s rarified brand.
Arcosanti
There was no monsoon season in Arizona last year, which poses significant problems if you live in a vertical mini-metropolis made from cast concrete on the face of a canyon. “Since the 1970s, the temperatures of this area in the summer have gone up almost twenty degrees,” said our Arcosanti tour guide, a tattooed artist and gardener in her thirties. “If we don’t get those rains, that’s like turning on a knob and leaving it on. It builds and builds, and the saguaros start dying.” It also turns concrete rooms into ovens, or that’s what I gathered from my guide’s weary murmurings about “thermal mass.”
As the only ongoing project on my Arizona tour, Arcosanti showed me how a futuristic architectural vision from the last century has fared in the actual future. Architect Paolo Soleri, who briefly and disastrously fellowed with Frank Lloyd Wright, broke ground on his own complex about an hour north of Phoenix in 1970. Though construction has never officially ended, it’s been stalled since 2008 due to funding challenges.
Soleri’s concept for a densely populated, automobile-free city full of multi-use buildings was informed by his philosophy of “arcology”—ecologically sound architecture. Eleven years after Soleri’s death, our tour guide and forty to eighty other people (depending on current programming) live in the 85,000-square-foot facility on 860 acres in Mayer, Arizona, a far cry from the population of 5,000 its founder envisioned.
As I wound through the stacked environment, which was a source of inspiration for the architecture of the planet of Tatooine in Star Wars, our guide highlighted the myriad ways in which Arcosanti has pivoted from expanding to sustaining. Now a nonprofit organization, the compound maintains a farming operation that supplies a restaurant, a foundry and ceramics studio that stocks a gift shop, a rotating slate of workshops and volunteer opportunities, and various systems for regulating temperature and storing water.
A few months after my visit, I spoke with Ivan Fritz, Arcosanti’s chief operating officer and acting executive director. Fritz and his mother moved to Arcosanti when he was six, and he grew up skateboarding its biomorphic concrete forms. He describes his childhood as “extremely magical.” I wanted Fritz’s take on a question that recurred during each of my Arizona tours: “Why did this place fail?” But I wondered if there was a more compelling question we should be asking about sites like these.
“About five percent of the original vision [for Arcosanti] was built,” Fritz says. “But five percent is extremely effective in demonstrating a lot of the principles that we were aiming for. It’s time for us to focus on what it means to be a little village, what it means to be an actual arcology. Are we honoring the ecology that we’re in?”
Fritz shares a tale of Soleri that exemplifies the architect’s competing impulses for the project. “He never told us how to govern ourselves. He would just say, ‘I just make the instrument, you play the music,’” Fritz recalls. “On the other hand, if someone came in and said… it needs to look like this or it has to happen like that, he would say, ‘Get your own mesa.’”
I turned to examine the whole complex in cross section, tracing the paths of the ant-like figures moving through it.
While downscaling Arcosanti’s ambitions might run counter to Soleri’s most grandiose ideas, perhaps it’s the right response in a time of shifting climate conditions and dwindling resources. However, these predicaments have only heightened our need for big, bold solutions. For humans to survive and become better stewards of the earth, we’ll need to unleash our own visionary impulses.
After the tour, my guide sent me down a hiking trail that traversed the Agua Fria River canyon, where Arcosanti is perched. Ascending the opposite cliffside, I turned to examine the whole complex in cross-section, tracing the paths of the ant-like figures moving through it. As the crow flies, I was only a few hundred yards away from this buzzing terrarium that has branded itself an “urban laboratory” despite its striking insularity.
The act of looking across the canyon felt like peering through time—I just couldn’t decide if I was beholding the past or the future. Maybe it was a little of both. Arcosanti is deeply rooted in the earth—a system of concrete veins that shelters its wards from the harsh outside world—but it also pushes against the horizon. It is a wide-open place crowned with crescents and apses that offer shimmering vistas and whisper futuristic promises.
