chapter 4

Chapter 4

My Third Arcosanti Workshop: Fall, 1978

I didn’t go to Arcosanti at all in 1977, although later, I heard it was a good year there. But as I rode the Trailways bus past Cordes Junction on my way to the Grand Canyon, I did wonder how things were going at Arcosanti. I heard later that there had been an Arcosanti Festival that summer at which Jackson Browne played, and good construction progress.

In spring, 1978, I graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology; my name was on the Dean’s List that Quarter. For summer, 1978, I landed a job by mail with the Yellowstone Park Company at Yellowstone National Park, in the northwest corner of Wyoming. I got this job on the strength of my three summers working at the Grand Canyon National Park Lodges. At Yellowstone, I initially had a job in Housekeeping, much as I had at the Grand Canyon, but before my summer job started, I had an accident that temporarily disabled my right foot. So I was assigned to the big industrial laundry next to Old Faithful Inn at Old Faithful Village. The atmosphere at Yellowstone was different from the one at the Grand Canyon. It was more conservative at Yellowstone and I stood out, there. For part of the summer of 1978, I was a National Park Service volunteer “Geyser Watcher” in Yellowstone’s major geyser basin, in which Old Faithful is located.

At the end of summer, 1978, after four months of hard work and interesting fun, I was wondering what to do next. I knew I didn’t want to go back to my parent’s home in Cincinnati. I thought I could probably return to my former position as Housekeeping Inspector with Grand Canyon National Park Lodges, but I decided to return to Arcosanti, where it had seemed I was always wanted and where I’d had, all in all, a good time. I wrote to The Cosanti Foundation, asking to sign up for the late October, 1978 Arcosanti Workshop. I got a letter back saying it was no longer necessary to take another Workshop in order to return to Arcosanti, but they took the Workshop fee I had sent anyway.

Another Yellowstone worker, Patrick Immel, who lived down the hall from me in the Yellowstone Park Company’s dormitory at Old Faithful Village, took a road trip with me from Yellowstone to Arcosanti. We had the use of the car of a friend who wanted it delivered to her father in Phoenix. The road trip proved to be long and harrowing. We stopped and backpacked at Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks in Utah; afterwards, we arrived at Arcosanti in the midst of the largest festival the Cosanti Foundation ever undertook, the fall 1978 Art in the Environment festival.

The fall 1978 Art in the Environment festival was held over a long weekend (Thursday, October 5 through Sunday, October 8), with a large stage constructed in the Valletta below the Arcosanti site. Makeshift amphitheater seating, made up of railroad ties, had been arranged on the hillside in front of the stage. The crowd covered the hill, burying it. Beautiful flags and banners, designed by California flag artist Anders Holmquist, flew from the buildings. Hundreds of people were everywhere, all over the site, and there were hundreds of cars the staff had to deal with.

For years, The Cosanti Foundation had pursued the idea that it could develop Arcosanti by putting on festivals in the spring and/or fall. The idea was that festivals would draw people to Arcosanti and get the general public interested in the project. The festivals would inspire people to become Workshoppers and donors. There was some truth to this but unfortunately, the festivals also diverted people and resources from concentrating on constructing Arcosanti. In point of fact, the festivals were never money-makers; and all they ever proved to be was trouble. The somewhat disorganized Cosanti Foundation was simply never able to handle such large undertakings. For example, during an evening concert at a festival some years prior, a man from a neighboring ranch appeared with a shotgun. This situation was defused but traumatic for all involved nonetheless. In fall, 1978, there was a much bigger problem.

Art in the Environment

As we drove onto the Arcosanti site, we saw a banner across the dirt road announcing the festival and a checkpoint where Arcosanti staff were selling and checking festival tickets. We stopped there; I showed my Workshop acceptance packet and told the staff that I was there for the late October Workshop. Someone handed me an official tag with the festival logo—a glowing pink cloud against a blue disk, to wear on my belt and identify me as a “Volunteer”—along with an Art in the Environment festival T-shirt. And in we went.

We drove across the back of the site, down the High Road to Camp, looking for a place to set up our tent. Of course, all the living spaces in Camp were occupied, but an Arcosanti person assured me that some of these would open up after the festival was over. Many other tents were pitched around Camp. Patrick and I erected our tent in a spot near the intersection of the High Road leading down from the mesa and the Ranch Road leading into the canyon north of the site. They said we weren’t really supposed to camp there, but since there was no where else to go, we could.

Patrick and I set up our camp, then walked around the festival grounds, looking at some of the booths between the main stage area in the Valletta and the big pond basin. Vendors sold T-shirts, jewelry and drinks, all for outrageous prices. The last booth had falafels on pita bread, luckily for us. We wandered around in the crowd, stopped to talk with a guy selling loose joints and managed to score a couple before he was run off the property. Stephen Stills was playing onstage.

We went up onto the mesa, where there were large, long tubes of transparent plastic filled with helium that floated over the Arcosanti site in great arcs. Another long-haired guy, who obviously lived there, thought he was cool and said he “didn’t know” anything about the petrochemicals used (or wasted) in the plastic tubes; but it seemed obvious to me that it was better to put those petrochemicals into a work of art than into the gas tanks of cars! I told him that Marshall McLuhan had some something like, “Art is anything you can get away with.” Though I never understood why he got angry when I said that, he responded vehemently, “Well, he was wrong!”

While Patrick and I were in the crowd down in the Valletta, some Arcosanti staffers came up to me and said they had been looking everywhere for me. They wanted me to work at the entrance behind the Arcosanti compound. I was put in front of the big round orange sculpture at the intersection of the High Road leading across the mesa, down into Camp, the Main Road coming into the site and the Low Road leading down the front of the mesa. Apparently Phoenix radio advertisements for the festival had drawn a larger crowd than expected and the staff didn’t know what to do with the overflow parking. They had begun to park cars in a grassy field south of Camp and east of the festival grounds. They told me to keep traffic moving down the High Road to the field but to block any traffic other than those on official Cosanti Foundation business from the Low Road, where there was a trailer, housing the festival office, parked below Crafts III.

An endless stream of traffic proceeded through the cattle guard and down the Hill to park in the grassy field. I became thirsty, standing there in the sun. I had a cup with me, which I held out to the passing throng, chanting like a beggar: “Water, pop, beer!?” Someone in a van filled my cup with beer. Although I dislike beer and was not supposed to drink any liquid with alcohol while I was on duty, it was better than nothing and it slaked my thirst.

Arcosanti staff people would visit occasionally, checking out the situation. Then, a plume of black smoke began riding over us from the southeast. Someone passing by asked what it was, and I said, “It’s probably the fire artist.” An artist participating in the festival had put work gloves and boots onto pieces of re-bar stuck in the ground in front of the site. They intended to soak the gloves and boots with gasoline and set them afire. This was supposed to be artistic. Little did I know. Shortly thereafter, someone came running up and exclaimed that the filed full of cars was on fire! I was shocked! The line of cars in front of me slowed to a crawl, then stopped altogether. The plume of smoke coming from the field grew larger.

Soon the Mayer Fire Department drove up, sirens blaring, in the old 1940s fire trucks they still had in the 1970s. Because of the traffic jam ahead, they wanted to drive down the Low Road to reach the fire. I explained to the firemen about the trailer blocking the way below Crafts III. They sat there for a few minutes, trying to decide what to do. Then the fire trucks slowly made their way around the line of cars and down the High Road.

Musicians in the festival went on playing during the fire – it seemed they were oblivious, but maybe they figured it was better to keep playing so help people stay calm. A girl walked by, crying. Her car had been destroyed; she said she would never come back again. Announcements were made over the public address system: No one should worry, the fire was under control. But the fire had completely laid to waste a field on which one hundred twenty cars were parked, and Arcosanti to date has not lived this fiasco down. Eventually, some Arcosanti staff arrived and I asked to be relieved. Todd Rundgren & Utopia played a fine last set onstage that evening, and that was the end of the Art in the Environment festival. The crowds made their way out of the Arcosanti grounds.

After directing traffic all afternoon and during the fire, I went down the hill to our campsite. My traveling partner, Patrick, was disgusted with Arcosanti, due to the fire. He blamed the administration of the project for the fire. Patrick didn’t like anything about the place. My eating a meal from the Camp Kitchen bothered him. “So you ate their food, huh?” he said, along with something about “Rats leaving a sinking ship.” The next day, after camping out with Patrick, I went to Morning Meeting in the Octagon. When I got back to our camp site, I discovered that Patrick had deserted Arcosanti and me, taking his stuff and the car, leaving my belongings scattered all over the ground. I gathered up my stuff and moved into Plywood City yet again; it was the only living space available.

That day after the festival, a group of us was assigned to cleaning up the Valletta where the crowd had been. There were a lot of aluminum cans and junk to recycle and some of the Arcosanti crews began dismantling the big stage. On one of the counters against the interior wall of the Octagon was a small green chalkboard. Serendipitously, I had recently read a science fiction story which featured arcologies. It was titled, After the Festival, so I wrote that slogan on the chalkboard.

Not long after this, Morning Meeting was moved up the Hill to the South Vault. During one of the Morning Meetings on the site, Mary asked for a volunteer for the Frank Lloyd Wright Scholarship. This “scholarship” was so-named because when Paolo worked under Mr. Wright at Taliesin West, he was a dishwasher and personal waiter for Mr. and Mrs. Wright. So the Frank Lloyd Wright Scholarship involved washing dishes in the Camp Kitchen for eight weeks, in exchange for living at Arcosanti, including meals plus $5 per week (“Food & Five” was an arrangement made by many Cosanti Foundation employees of the time). I had the idea that I wanted to stay on at Arcosanti past my Workshop. Since I’d already paid tuition for the Workshop, I thought the combination of the “scholarship” and my Workshop fee would allow me to stay well past the end of the Workshop. But as things turned out, actually, I had to leave Arcosanti for Cosanti at the end of November, 1978.

Mary was surprised that I wanted to volunteer for the FLW Scholarship but I reported to the Camp Kitchen for duty right away. I had had jobs washing dishes in the past and the work wasn’t that bad. The Camp Kitchen was a medium-sized room dominated by a large iron gas-burning stove, with counters for food preparation, a large refrigerator and a large steel double sink at which I worked. I mostly washed pots and pans that had been used to cook the food; dishes were not too numerous and were easy to wash. It was so warm that autumn someone in the Kitchen suggested that we turn on “swamp cooler” so it wouldn’t be so hot at the sink. I didn’t know what a “swamp cooler” was. She turned a valve under the sink and flipped a switch. What does a valve have to do with cooling? She explained.

There were perhaps five people including me, working in the Camp Kitchen that fall. But it seemed as ift all of Arcosanti came into the Kitchen at some point or another. Although the staff tried to keep them out, people were always dropping in to visit the Kitchen: the scene in the Kitchen, what with all the cooking and cleaning there was to do, was always controlled chaos. Other people hung around Camp, including the gardeners; some people played music on vinyl records, on an old stereo in the Octagon. Fairport Convention, the British folk-rock group from the late 1960’s, was a favorite.

Rick the cook was a brother of another prominent Arcosanti worker, an architect named Jeff Zucker. Rick was a real hard-core counter-culturist. He made “natural” dishes I had never heard of. Tabouli? Couscous? Tamari? I did know what Tofu was and I didn’t like it. But Rick tried to cater to everyone’s taste and usually made meat dishes in addition to vegetarian fare. Breakfast and lunch were trucked up the Hill and served it from tables in the Vaults, just as they had been on my first Workshop. I always went along, to help load, set up and take down.

I always had a dislike of much of the “natural” food served at Arcosanti, from the Camp Kitchen in the early days and from the Café in modern times. When given a choice, I will take more conventional food over something like Tabouli, Baba Ganoush or Tofu Soup. I prefer pasta with meat sauce, pot roast, a hamburger or a hot dog, thank you, even if I do like falafel or hummus with Pita bread, as well as lots of fresh fruit. But since Arcosanti has been dominated by people who were in the counter-culture, the habits and beliefs of the counter-culture have influenced the daily living experience. Even though Paolo does not adhere to many of these ideas, his influence in these areas has mostly been minimal.

While much of modern mainstream society has overlooked the fundamental importance of healthy food and come to rely on unhealthy “convenience” and “fast”foods, modern counter-cultural obsession with “natural food” and “healthy” eating –by which I mean vegetarianism, or veganism, demonstrates, I think, how the counter-culture has deteriorated. Its adherents harbor incorrect and just plain wrong-headed notions about food, including such ideas as “drinking milk promotes the formation of phlegm in the body,”or “eating garlic cloves can prevent or cure the common cold,” ideas refuted by science. These notions can sometimes lead to orthorexic (orthorexia nervosa) behavior, a type of eating disorder. Most counter-culturalists at Arcosanti are concerned with human habitat by virtue of their involvement in the project and Paolo’s arcology concept does include solar greenhouses for food production, which directly addresses the problems of food production, distribution, and agricultural land use. But the counter-culture at large (what’s left of it) has incorrect notions of sustainability that actually support destructive and wasteful suburban sprawl. Focusing on something like food and eating habits takes away from the quintessential problems of civilization that are highlighted by the problem of human habitat.

Once Rick had a lot of hamburger to cook and didn’t quite know what to do with it, so he decided to make little hamburger men. I don’t know if he was trying to make a statement or a joke or what, but I thought this was funny. However, when the hamburger men were served to the workers up on the job site, some of them actually became angry. I couldn’t believe it. The omnivores ate them in sandwiches anyway. After we returned to the Camp Kitchen, Paolo came by. Rick asked him about the problem with the hamburger men and Paolo said something about tolerance.

Another Arcosanti Seminar

Toward the end of my eight-week Frank Lloyd Wright Scholarship period, the Cosanti Foundation administration announced another Arcosanti Seminar field trip that would again be a week-long journey and cost $25 per person. Jack Blackwell would lead the Seminar once again. I immediately signed up to go along, and then Mary pointed out that this was barely the end of my time as a Frank Lloyd Wright dishwasher. I said I knew that, but it seemed right for me to end it then and go on the Seminar trip; she agreed. Red-haired Kathy, who had worked in construction and then in the Camp Kitchen, came along as cook. She prepared plastic containers of food for the field trip with masking tape labels reading: “Seminar Only—Don’t Fuck With It!”

This time, Cosanti Foundation rented a flatbed truck with steel framework up the sides and over the bed of the truck. They stretched a canvas tarp across the top. While the truck was backed up to the Camp Kitchen for loading, I hung around, saying loudly for all to hear: “Roll up, roll up, for the magical mystery tour!” A bunch of us Arcosantiers piled into the bed of the truck and hung our backpacks on the sides of the frame. We must have been quite a sight, rolling down the road.

Jack initially kept the Seminar itinerary a secret. But when we drove out of the Arcosanti site and out onto the road, he handed out mimeographed Seminar itineraries. On the way, he handed out photocopies of articles he wanted us to read. One was from Mother Jones, about the Bechtel Corporation’s alleged assistance to the CIA so it could transport arms to Africa, hidden in concrete sewer pipes. Both Bechtel and the CIA denied this alliance, and Jack was hoping Bechtel, one of the world’s largest construction contractors, would build Arcosanti. Another article Jack distributed was by Paolo himself, from Earth’s Answer, a book describing the Two Suns Arcology concept.

Our first planned stop was the Hopi reservation in northeastern Arizona, but this turned out to be a bust. Hopi Tribal Representatives met our group at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, in a replica of a Hopi ceremonial Kiva. They told us this truck full of hippies couldn’t just descend on the Hopi Reservation—it would put the Hopis off and they wouldn’t talk to us. So the representatives there in the Museum answered our few questions about the Hopis on the spot. Embarrassing.

Another stop we made during this Seminar field trip was on the north side of the San Francisco Peaks, outside Flagstaff. We drove in the cold open bed of the truck through the aspen forest with snow on the ground to a large meadow in which sat a large wood cabin. Gathered in the cabin with a warm fire in the large stone fireplace, we ate some dinner, then sat around and talked until everyone crawled into their sleeping bags and went to sleep. The next morning, we all met out in the meadow in front of the cabin and formed a large circle, holding hands. I was late and missed the morning greeting, but Jack and the group gabbed a bit more and then we got back into the truck.

That 1978 Arcosanti Seminar field trip covered a lot of territory. We visited the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, west of Phoenix, today the largest nuclear power plant complex in the country. When we got there, we were asked to leave our truck and board a green bus that drove us through the complex for the tour. Much of this site was still under construction although it was my understanding that one nuclear reactor had recently been activated. The man who drove the bus gave us descriptions and explanations, as he drove us along through the complex, about that beehive of activity with large crews and a lot of heavy construction equipment. At one point, the driver gave the total yardage of concrete poured at the complex each day. Back at Arcosanti, we had just poured the most yardage of concrete in one pour ever to be poured at Arcosanti. It was miniscule compared to that poured for the nuclear plant complex. We all laughed when the driver gave us the plant’s daily pour yardage, at which the man driving the bus slammed on the brakes and angrily exclaimed, “OK we can go back to the gate right now!” Jack tried to explain to the man why we were laughing. Evidently, a recent and large anti-nuclear demonstration at Palo Verde had made the crews especially touchy, but we did go on to finish the tour.

On that long trip, we also drove in the truck through the suburbs of Scottsdale on the way back to Arcosanti, briefly stopping at Cosanti on the way. I stood in the back of the truck, watching the passing suburbs, the anathema of Arcosanti. The Fleetwood Mac song, You Make Loving Fun, ran through my mind: “I never could believe in miracles, but I’ve a feeling it’s time to try…” as I waxed romantic about Arcosanti, its prospects for success. When we finally arrived there, Jack held a brief discussion in the Vaults, but since it was a work day, we were expected to go right to work. I was assigned to helping with a large makeshift greenhouse being erected in the Garden in Camp. I paused at my space in Plywood City to drop my stuff off, briefly hung out with a few people there who were all passing a joint around. I was late for work and Joe Mathers, the chief gardener, chastised me for not being there when needed.

Construction Work

By the fall of 1978, I had moved into a Cube across from the Bathroom building in Camp that I shared with my architect friend Joe Matchey. He left Arcosanti soon afterward, and I was then the sole occupant of the Cube. After my second Arcosanti Seminar field trip, I was put to work in construction once again. Getting up pre-dawn and hiking up the Hill for Morning Meeting and work on the job site was difficult for me. Boots pounded past my Cube as I struggled to get ready for the day. I even had a few dreams that I was in a concentration camp.

I worked with the crews constructing the new East Crescent, under a big, muscular guy named Reiny, a real Arcosanti construction worker. We were building wood form work for the concrete walls to be poured in the southeast corner of what would eventually become first the Drafting Room, then the Library, and eventually the “Red Room,” in the Soleri-Office-Drafting (S.O.D.) Unit at the southeast end of the East Crescent.

The S.O.D. Unit was originally intended as a housing complex for Paolo and his family. The main floor, where the Arcosanti Office is today, was to be Paolo’s studio, a living room and Colly’s office. The upper floor was planned to house the master bedroom and another bedroom for Colly’s mother, Mrs. Woods. The bottom floor was to be offices, storage and Drafting Room. The small attached greenhouse there warms and ventilates the Drafting Room. Upon Colly’s death in 1982, Paolo decided to give most of the unit over to Cosanti Foundation’s activities and occupy only the L-shaped master bedroom – it became his studio apartment.

The formwork Reiny and I were building took a few days to construct. Construction work was difficult for me and I had to constantly ask what to do next but I kept my spirits up by humming a Jackson Browne tune. On the day we poured concrete into the form work, it popped open at the bottom and all the concrete ran down the existing foundation. I was surprised and saddened. The whole pour was obviously a wasted effort of our time and resources. Reiny reassured me that it was really his fault. We spent two days rebuilding the form work and when the concrete was poured the second time, the form work held.

At Arcosanti, Halloween is always a special occasion for a large party. Many Halloween parties have been held in the Lab Building or somewhere else in the East Crescent; over the years, the Halloween party has progressed in sophistication. Everyone tries to make creative costumes for the event, raiding Ferguson’s for materials. For Halloween, 1978, Ferguson’s yielded an old electric guitar body with no strings and some old jeans and T-shirts. I decided to go as a punk rocker, tore holes in the T-shirt and pinned it with safety pins. I wrote funny, disgusting things in marker on the jeans (“dog breath”), showing off the clash between the old counter-culture and the then-current New Wave culture. At the party, I made a big deal of acting like I was playing the guitar and then attempting to smash it against the concrete floor! This is harder than it looks when rock stars do it! I did not actually succeed in smashing the guitar.

Thanksgiving, 1978 arrived; most Arcosanti folks took the day off and the site was closed to visitors. In the morning, while cooking and set-up for the community Thanksgiving dinner progressed, Paolo and new Cosanti Foundation executive Skip Sagar held a debate under the North Vault in front of the Lab Building. Before the debate, Skip warned us against making a cult of personality around Paolo. Paolo and Skip held a philosophical debate, with Skip taking the position of “specificity” versus Paolo’s position of “ambiguity.” That afternoon, Thanksgiving dinner was held al fresco in the Foundry Apse. Guinea hens as well as turkey were served, along with all the usual Thanksgiving trappings. There was a tofu-turkey served to the vegetarians (how they could eat that, I don’t know). Just before eating, instead of a prayer or affirmation or whatever, Paolo stood up and admonished us all to “Think of Calcutta!”

Thanksgiving was the end of the construction season at Arcosanti. I had not done well in construction and the Cosanti Foundation was being sued for the Festival car fire. I asked Mary Hoadley whether I could stay on through the winter; she told me workers were needed at Cosanti to make Soleri windbells and so I should inquire there. I took this as an attempt to get rid of me but I asked Nick, foreman of the Arcosanti Foundry, about it; I had to ask him again before he finally said that I just had to go down there. So, I packed my stuff and went. The guy who gave me a ride to Cosanti was a Christian; he had a big blue dove painted on the side of his pickup truck.