Architecture Commons^™

Paolo Soleri And Arcology: An Analytical Comparison To Frank Lloyd Wright And Louis Kahn, Henry Millard

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

The city proposals of Paolo Soleri, he called them arcologies, are monumental and complex geometric megastructures intended to project great heights above desert horizons. These proposals purposefully abandon conventional notions of the city.

Soleri was physically isolated in his remote Arizona urban laboratory, Arcosanti, and philosophically detached from the professional urban design community. His proposals were often too easily understood as foreign and radical dystopian architectural metaphors meant to provoke thought more than to project an actual future. There is limited discourse on Soleri and this tends to isolate him in a vacuum, ignoring possible connections or parallels in his …

Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff, Community Design Center

Project Reports

Once a prosperous cultural urban center in the Mississippi River delta, but now the nation’s second fastest shrinking city, Pine Bluff (population: 42,700) is Arkansas’ Detroit. Indeed, a study of black wealth conducted by famed sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois in 1899 found that Pine Bluff had the fourth highest rate of black wealth in the nation behind Charleston, Richmond, and New York City. The school’s community design center prepared a downtown revitalization plan, Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff, a housing-first initiative focused on building neighborhoods around downtown “centers of strength”. While the revitalization approach is triaged around a …