Paolo Soleri

Italian-American architect and urban planner (1919–2013), founder of the Cosanti Foundation and Arcosanti, who coined the concept of "arcology" — architecture fused with ecology.

Soleri argued that sprawling, car-dependent cities waste land, energy, and human time, and proposed dense, three-dimensional "arcologies" that concentrate urban life into resource-frugal megastructures. Arcosanti, his experimental town in the Arizona desert begun in 1970, was built over decades as a partial demonstration of the idea.

Role in Fuller's orbit

Soleri shares Fuller's comprehensive, do-more-with-less ambition for the built environment, applied at the scale of whole cities. Both proposed radically efficient alternatives to conventional settlement; Soleri's arcology is a cousin of Fuller's domed-city and Spaceship-Earth thinking, pursued through a very different, hand-built aesthetic.

See Also

• Hideo Sasaki (Hideo Sasaki) — contemporary designer of environment-integrated landscape and settlement

• Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth) — Fuller's frugal, whole-system view of human settlement on Earth

• Norman Foster (Norman Foster) \x{2014} contemporary architect who worked directly with Fuller

• Cosanti Foundation (Cosanti Foundation) — the arcology foundation he established

Sources

• Paolo Soleri (source reference) — Zotero People collection (Wikipedia entry)