Urban Wilderness Chicago: Part 1

Time to play some more catch up. Last weekend I ventured out to Chicago on my own on a kind of spur of the moment whim. I looked up a few Chicagoans on Couchsurfing.com, secured a free place to crash and off I went!

I wound up staying with a couple of local playwrights, one of whom dabbled more in acting than in playwriting. They had me meet them at the Neo-futurarium to see a production of The Fool (Returns to His Chair). My hosts were not involved in this particular production, but the are very involved with the neo-futurists. The playhouse experiments with the interaction of an audience and its performers, and the play was curiously engaging to say the least. I'm still mulling over just how I felt about it. At one point, I even imagined that I somehow stumbled into a Laura McNamara version of the Truman Show and that I was ultimately the fool. That wasn't the case, but I did start to wonder...

After the play, I joined one of my hosts, Ira Murfin, and some of his friends for dinner at Andies, a Mediterranean restaurant. The food was excellent and I tried Basmati dill rice for the first time. I need to look up the recipe. It was a fun, zingy twist to the traditional side of rice. Good food and good conversation. I ws particularly enthralled with Ira's account of his volunteer work at a developing architectural community in Arizona called Arcosanti. Here's a brief description of the premise behind the community:

In 1970, the Cosanti Foundation began building Arcosanti, an experimental town in the high desert of Arizona, 70 miles north of metropolitan Phoenix. When complete, Arcosanti will house 5000 people, demonstrating ways to improve urban conditions and lessen our destructive impact on the earth. Its large, compact structures and large-scale solar greenhouses will occupy only 25 acres of a 4060 acre land preserve, keeping the natural countryside in close proximity to urban dwellers.

Arcosanti is designed according to the concept of arcology (architecture + ecology), developed by Italian architect Paolo Soleri. In an arcology, the built and the living interact as organs would in a highly evolved being. This means many systems work together, with efficient circulation of people and resources, multi-use buildings, and solar orientation for lighting, heating and cooling.

Sounds fascinating to me. Ira wrote an essay which was included in a book on Paolo Soleri. His essay demonstrates how Soleri's Cosanti concept and his Arcosanti community are not just about architecture, but also about an approach to architecture that seems more or less counter-intuitive to society today. An approach where less is more and where vision is integral to realization.

Ira explained that anyone can participate. You sign up for a 4-week training workshop and then you stay on site and help develop the community. I've been pining away about going back to grad school for architecture ever since my brief stay in Rome. I think this would be an excellent way to introduce myself to the field. Participating in the Arcosanti development is now on my list of immediate priorities.

More to come on the Urban Wilderness Chicago experience...