2022FALL CHENYAN WANG
DESERT UTOPIA
Experimental Labs in Arizona during 1960s-1990s
Against the background of global environmental governance and human unsettlement during the 1960s and 1970s, issues such as nuclear threats, population explosions and exploding metropolises served as triggers of public fear and anxiety. In the era of “population became a kind of thick natural phenomenon”[1], scientists, engineers, and architects were eagerly seeking experimental sites with both freedom and safety. As Jean Gottmann argued, there is a structural contradiction between the traditional functions of territory, which is a “shelter for security” and a “springboard for opportunity”[2]: while the former seeks “relative isolation,” and the latter thrives on a “degree of interdependence with the outside”[3]. The desert, as an extreme geographical environment, can bridge this structural gap to some extent. Hence, deserts like Arizona happened to witness the management of populations, environmental declarations, and geopolitical transformation.
The desert is incapable of untruth. All the clues hidden in the sand will eventually be pieced together to form a complete portrait of the 1960s and 70s. The desert can also be regarded as an effective approach to inquire into the roots behind the waxing and waning of strong environmental movements in the late 20th century[4]. Architectural experiments in the deserts were particularly well-poised to offer crucial insight into that period, in the context of technologically and environmentally oriented post-war architectural discourse.
Here, I would like to observe some experimental labs in Arizona from a period spanning the 1960s through the 1990s. Some were living machines; others were ventures that pushed techno-utopia to its limits. It is worth reconsidering these specific cases in the context of their times, as an assemblage of technological, cultural, and political complexities that they embody. These experiments are both events and connections, symbiotic with the past, present, and future of the vast desert.
Eden Under the Dome
As R. Buckminster Fuller argued, a culture’s creativity requires an outlaw area[5], which he identifies as marginal geographical locations—outer space, oceans, deserts and so on. Deserts promise relative liberation and micro-experimentation with new economic and political paradigms. As Brand has suggested, desert colonies would provide the architecture of “separate whole systems”[6]. Colonists arranged themselves under the dome as a protected area, not only as a realm of autonomy, but as a realm of supreme sovereignty, one that could overcome the contradictions and alienation of modernity.
When we speak of the term “dome”, it will undoubtedly remind us of American inventor R. Buckminster Fuller. The geodesic dome, which has been recognized as a strong, light, and efficient means of enclosing space, became ubiquitous in military and civilian use in the late 20th century. As a symbolic structural form, the dome embodies contradictory but symbiotic elements: freedom, protection, commodification, and techno-utopianism.
The sites of these experimental labs unearthed the political and economic policy questions as asked by John Foster Dulles: “How should collective defense be organized by the free world for maximum protection at minimum cost?”[7]Policies such as industrial dispersion, decentralization and taxation offered Arizona a distinct competitive advantage and created both an inviting and friendly business climate for the potential adventurers.[8]Hence, Arizona became the ideal place for industrialized subjectivities and exploitative authorities to commit their “heroic” production and accumulation. With its isolated geographic location and uncluttered air waves, Arizona became a battleground and home front for military occupations, missile production facilities, corporate research laboratories and test buildings during the Cold War period.
Moreover, the semispherical prototype cannot be detached from the Cold War thoughts, which persisted for decades as a mindset[9]and an existing fact. As relations between the Soviet Union and the United States deteriorated in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the threat of nuclear war and the need for fallout shelters increased dramatically. The dome, with its womb-like sense of safety, became a symbol of protection. When we go back to the geodesic dome designed by Fuller, we can find the shelter prototype in the 1960 proposal to skin midtown Manhattan with a plastic dome, providing a controlled climate, but with an unavoidable implication that it could provide protection from nuclear fallout.
The Titan II missile silo, which is a provincial historical society museum now, was located underground in the south of Tucson, Arizona. Echoing metal tunnels, gray computer consoles and submarine-like vault doors made up a steely, chilly mausoleum of America's nuclear past.[10] Beneath the dome were not just military installations, but more visions of housing and factories. Like the evacuation nation proposed by the strategist Herman Kahn, a permanent civil defense footing in which it was “perfectly conceivable. . . that the U.S. might have to evacuate two or three times every decade.”[11] The dome of Titan launch control center built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which represented the highest degree of blast protection capability, can be seen as a metaphorical structure that merges technological optimism with Cold War pessimism.
If Titan represented the aggressive defensive function of the dome, the dome in Biosphere 2.0 may be understood symbolically as the victim of neoliberal commodification and space race. Constructed between 1987 and 1991, and located in the mountains north of Tucson, Arizona, Biosphere 2.0 is a living laboratory for global ecological processes, assuming ecology to be an experimental science. Under the pretense of space race, the biosphere 2.0 was intended to reintroduce ecological approaches to the challenge of space life support, ameliorating closed biospheres in space colonization.
The form of Biosphere 2.0 did not break through the stereotype of traditional botanical gardens, creating an immersive experience through large areas of glass and the iconic hemispherical dome. The geodesic dome aimed to produce a “recessive” architecture, an enclosure which, clearance, span and lightness, allows its visitors to become immersed in the worlds it contains: it is at once interior and exterior, both enclosure and ‘artificial sky’.[12]The “poetical handling of standardized steel and glass components”, as William Curtis has described it, became a certain vocabulary translated from the abstract, mechanical processes of American management and industry.[13]
In a sense, the desert, especially in the United States, can be regarded not only as a productive experimental ecology but also as a commodified object. As Neil Smith has argued, the concept of nature itself is largely a product of commodification as it is deeply embedded in forms of imperial economic and political rationality.[14] The biosphere 2.0 shares a similar destiny with most of the greenhouses, which represented the confidence in human attempts to protect natural artifacts and regulate ecosystems, then inevitably become the object of consumption. People immersed themselves into a natural treasure chest, dispelling the real world in an exotic enclosed space. The interior of the living machine was no longer self-sufficient, and replaced by an extravagant greenhouse. Thus, Biosphere 2.0 declared the bankruptcy of its idealism, and helplessly became a market product to be consumed. As Virginia Woolf described in the end of her short story ‘Kew Gardens’, the garden was “like a vast nest of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel turning ceaselessly one within another the city murmured”[15].Postmodern architectural forms coupled with an immersive amusement park experience eventually became a paradigm for the commercialization of greenhouses. And when the shell of postwar radical environmentalism and the space race was removed, all that remained was an ecological box of self-delusion.
Another classic example of a technological utopia is Arcosanti designed by architect Paolo Soleri. The construction of Arcosanti in the Arizona desert began in 1972 based on the principles of arcology. Escaping from a troubled urban and territorial sovereignty, Arcosanti promised liberation from reconciliation with local political constraints and the existing urban fabric, swaying ambiguously between utopic and dystopic imaginations.
In contrast to the commodified and consumable domes of Biosphere 2, the hemispherical structure of Arcosanti is more about the individual aesthetic. From Soleri’s first semi-subterranean projects, the Dome House (1949) in Cave Creek Arizona, to Ceramics Apse in Arcosanti, we see the aesthetic coherence of Soleri’s vision through the hemispherical structure. Soleri built the dome in a more sculptural way by casting bronze bells and earthen "silt casting" techniques. Compared with the modernist transparency reflected by glass of greenhouse, the domes in Arcosanti were dense, opaque and brut. The living area of the Dome House had a double dome, half glass and half opaque, with the inner and outer layers rotating independently. However, this double-layer dome was not applied and developed in the subsequent utopia Arcosanti. The ingenuity in settlement design gave way to a grander narrative of arcological architecture, disappeared in the vision of Arcosanti.
These experimental buildings, in the later period, were all crowned with the name of educational laboratories, and eventually became the crystal ball of the environmental manifesto in that transformative time. As Brand has argued, “Fervent visions, shared to excess, became clanking clichés. All that was left was daily reality, with its endless negotiation”[16].Visions of all the thorny problems such as energy crisis, the food crisis, the arms race, the population problem, and maybe even the climatic shift, which would be neatly resolved through the colonization of this vast desert[17], had become mirages. What remained, was the Eden under the dome, which served as little more than a short-term palliative intended to alleviate the anxieties of a crisis-ridden global system.
Cosmology: Architecture as Salvation
As Foucault concluded in The Order of Things, “Utopia, have no real locality,” but “there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical.”[18]The desert endowed Arcosanti, a techno-utopia, with a strong sense of divinity and epic heroism, where architecture exists as redemption.
A large, open-ended reinforced concrete barrel vault stood at the center of Arcosanti, functioned as a gathering space. As one of the important indicators of Soleri's classicism, it visually formed a strong leading and awe-inspiring view of the surrounding desert landscape. Much talked about in this techno-utopia was the apse of its bronze foundry, where the Soleri bells was cast. The apse resembles the quarter-spherical hollow of a Romanesque cathedral, the center giving way to side chapels.[19] The coincidence that the giant cybernetic creature happened to bear a resemblance to the medieval apse drew Soleri plenty of criticism. Soleri’s utopia, according to Banham, was actually “a modernist archaism”[20], especially when it was “envisaged as futuristic high-tech creatures”[21], thus mirroring its conservative approach to the environmental crisis. Archaism was remarkably evident in the axonometric section of Arcosanti, which was initially a conceptual ‘Mesa topography’ in Seleri’s 1969 book Arcology: City in the Image of Man. In this book, Arcosanti's plan was a simple rectangle covering seven acres, cutting on three sides with segmented domes that open outwards. Archaism was remarkably evident in the axonometric section of Arcosanti, where the symmetrical pantheon-like hemispherical domes became the center of the utopia, both functionally and spiritually. For the spherical structure, Soleri used the metaphor of square cosmology to describe the curve as a trap, so as to form a special trajectory to tame the sun, “by selecting those radiations that are kind and rejecting those that are unkind”[22]. Although, in later constructions, the absolute symmetry of the drawings was abandoned, the architectural aesthetics of the hemispherical dome was preserved and enhanced. The characteristics of archaism had not been weakened by this, but through Soleri’s unique casting technique, the shells became intrusive sculptures in the desert. As Greene summed up: “Soleri merely has a passionate desire to make the city a sculptural object with reference to his own styling preferences.”[23]The reason why described Soleri’s utopia to desert sculpture is from a more fundamental and texture level, as Banham noted, the Arcologies did little to transform Athens Charter urban segregation. Under the criticism of archaism and individual heroism, was the trope of organicism itself behind Arcosanti the result of the development of second-order cybernetics after World War II? Did Soleri's cosmology have mystical and religious tendencies? And how did the experiments of architecture in extreme environments become a form of redemption during the Cold War?
Although, Soleri was often labeled as an architect with highly religious sensibility, whenever talking about religion, he reformulated the word with religare (Latin for 'to bond together'), representing the linking and bonding that is the dynamically interactive essence of life. While volition, as Soleri defines it, is the motive force at work in religare; it is the driving eros toward connectivity that is the condition of the possibility of life.[24]“The avalanche of life and ‘goods’ that is cascading on us is begging for a structure. Meaningfulness is not something that extravagantly comes into being”[25], Soleri attempted to explain his philosophy of arcological systems by arguing for the high uniformity of organizational structures at atomic and cosmic scales. For Soleri, the aesthetic form was an effective approach to reimagine the interactions of mind and matter, while the dome served as a condensed symbol[26]to demonstrate the positive connection between architecture and the rhythm of cosmos.
The desert is a place where people can perceive the infinity of time and absorb its abstract power uninterruptedly. Like Austin concluded in The Land of Little Rain (1903), “The desert favors the sense of personal relation to the supernatural”[27]. Soleri created a Kantian sublime experience through the concrete domes, weaving temporality as an irreversible substance in the shadows projected by the curves of the hemisphere. The wonder and celebration of the cosmic itself was pursued by Soleri through domes, in a more precise term coined by Rudolf Otto, mysterium tremendum. Soleri posited the city as an eschatological tool, an Apollinian technology that produces a temporary congealment in the interplay of vital and material forces that shape life itself.[28]Against the backdrop of environmental crisis and the space race, Soleri highlighted the importance of thrift in extreme conditions. Design of self-sufficient system became the paradigm for constructing ideal realities. In the early 19th century, thermodynamics challenged the implication of eternity in the mechanistic image of the universe[29]. Soleri also made extensive references to the theory of thermodynamics and entropy in his book. Alessandra Ponte has pointed out the ironic proximity of Soleri’s actual constructions with Smithson’s entropic ideal[30], an irony that rests on the level of land sculpture. Although Soleri repeatedly emphasized that, the city would be a self-aware hyperorganism, the archetypes borrowed heavily from classicism were not enough to be the strongest proof. While “Self-aware” eventually ended up being a pilgrimage-like free rotating workforce of counterculture dropouts and architecture undergraduates. The practice of energy balance at the scientific level eventually stopped at the application of the renewable energy of the sun.
Obviously, it is difficult for Arcosanti to get rid of the messianic metaphor that, the savior leading a group of devout disciples into the desert to establish a new civilization. While, Discussions like the authoritarian boundary of individual architects in the realization of technological utopia; the relationship between radical, avant-garde and heroic environmental declarations and capitalist conservatism; whether the experimental labs can be the golden mean to mediate geopolitical crises are still worthwhile to been put on the table. Arcosanti’s disconnection between parables and methods made us constantly reflect on the limits of techno-utopia. Although most utopias end in failure, the wave of ecological architecture in late 20th century, is not just an ethics of saving the world, but as a subversion of psychological space or spiritual speculation, promoting the reality of social change and architecture movement.[31]
Conclusion
The desert figures more as medium than as material. It serves as a stage set or backdrop for all the architecture experiments. The desert is a path, a metaphor for human colonization and liberation.
The desert is far away to forget the toxic destruction of the urban world and accelerate the creation of Eden under the dome. Architectural form such as semispherical became a prototype for emergency shelter in the shadow of the Cold War and climate crisis. Thus, the desert was regard as a petri dish for experiments on human settlement. During 1970s-1990s, neoliberal capitalism shifted its burden of environmental governance from urban to the desert, where proved to be a perfect virgin land for architects to fulfill their environmental ambitions. Under the background of the global exile, lots of experimental laboratories like Arcosanti, Biosphere 2.0 and Titan II launch center emerged. The desert became the spiritual oasis for the test buildings.
The desert is a place where finitude and physicality in space can be transformed into the infinity of pure spirit. As a narrative of salvation of modernity, the desert provides the conditions in which a holy spirit can pervade the utopia community. In the meantime, the desert also serves as the starting point of outer space exploration. Human gradually conquer the desert in the form of invading nomadism, forcing the extreme ecosystem to be more friendly, thus increasing the confidence of outer space colonization.
[1] Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978. trans. Graham Burchell, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p.71.
[2] Jean Gottmann, The Significance of Territory, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1973), p.14
[3]Felicity D. Scott, Outlaw Territories, Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counterinsurgency (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016), trans. Jean Gottmann, The Significance of Territory(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1973)
[4] Anthony Vidler” John McHale and the Bucky Fuller Revival”, in EcoRedux: Design Remedies for an Ailing Planet, special issue of Architectural Design, 80, no.6 (November/ December, 2010). p.28
[5] Calvin Tomkins, “In the Outlaw Area,” New Yorker, January 8, 1996, p.35-97
[6] Stewart Brand, Space Colonies (New York: Penguin,1977), p.72
[7] Edgar Bottome, Balance of Terror (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), p.22.
[8] Jason H. Gart, The Defense Establishment in Cold War Arizona, 1945–1968, Journal of Arizona History, Volume 60, Number 3, Autumn 2019, p. 301-332
[9] Tom Vanderbilt. Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), p.17
[10] Tom Vanderbilt. Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), p.37
[11] Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), p.225.
[12] Pearman, Hugh and Andrew Whalley, 2003, The Architecture of Eden, (London: Transworld Publishers), p. 8.
[13] William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900 (New York: Phaidon,1996), p.400.
[14] Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, (Athens: University of Georgia Press,2008).
[15] Virginia Woolf, “Kew Gardens”, Monday or Tuesday. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921.), p.15
[16] Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. (Atlantic Books, 2010).
[17] Stewart Brand, Space Colonies (New York: Penguin,1977), “The Sky Starts at Your Feet” p.6
[18] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970), p.xviii
[19] Chris Malloy, “Step Inside This City of the Future That Time Forgot,” Architectural Digest, March 7, 2018, https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/paolo-soleri-arcosanti-arizona.
[20] Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), p.203
[21] Felicity D. Scott, Outlaw Territories, Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counterinsurgency (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016), p.206
[22] Paolo Soleri, Arcology: City in the Image of Man (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1969). P.120 Arcosanti
[23] David Greene, A Blast From the Past, (Design, 41, July, 1971), p. 434
[24] Lissa McCullough, Conversations with Paolo Soleri. (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012.) p.22
[25] Paolo Soleri, Arcology: City in the Image of Man (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1969). P.121 Arcosanti
[26] The sociologist Mary Douglas proposed the concept of “condensed symbol” in the 60s, that certain practices or ideas can become a kind of shorthand for a whole worldview. See Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, (Routledge, December 6, 1996)
[27] Mary Hunter Austin, The land of Little Rain (New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903), p.120-121
[28] Larry Busbea, “Paolo Soleri and the Aesthetics of Irreversibility,” The Journal of Architecture 18, no. 6 (2013): pp. 781-808, https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2013.858271.
[29] Alvin Toffler, ‘Foreword: Science and Change’, Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (Toronto and New York, Bantam Books, 1984), pp. xii–xiv.
[30] Alessandra Ponte, The House of Light and Entropy (London: AA Publications, 2014). p.29-30
[31] On the theme of architecture and the history of ecology, see Felicity Scott, Architecture or Techno- Utopia (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2007); John Goodbun, ‘Gregory Bateson’s Ecological Aesthetics— An Addendum to Urban Political Ecology’, Field, 4, no.1 (January, 2011), pp. 35–46; Lydia Kallipoliti, EcoRedux: Design Remedies for an Ailing Planet, special issue of Architectural Design, 80, no.6 (November/December, 2010).
Appendix:
Figure 1(Left): Titan II launch center, south of Tucson, Arizona. Retrieved from Tom Vanderbilt, Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), p.38.
Figure 2(Right): Inside the Titan II missile silo, south of Tucson, Arizona. Retrieved from Tom Vanderbilt, Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), p.37.
Figure 3: Schematic of Biosphere 2 showing the layout of the wilderness biomes, farm (intensive agriculture), human habitat, and lung structures. All of Biosphere 2 shared water resources and atmosphere. The lungs are connected to the main structure by underground air tunnels, as originally draw by Elizabeth Dawson. Retrieved from Mark Nelson, Pushing Our Limits: Insights from Biosphere 2. (The University of Arizona Press, 2018). p.36.
Figure 4: The First International Conference on Closed Ecological Systems and Biospherics, 1987, Royal Society, London. Roy Walford asks a question of Josef Gitelson (at podium), IBP. Seated from left: Margaret Augustine, CEO of Space Biospheres Ventures; Ganna Meleshko, head of the closed ecological systems laboratory at IBMP, Moscow; Clair Folsome, University of Hawaii; William Knott, head of the bioregenerative life support program at NASA Kennedy Space Center. Chairing the conference. As originally photographed by D. P. Snyder. Retrieved from Mark Nelson, Pushing Our Limits: Insights from Biosphere 2. (The University of Arizona Press, 2018). p.8.
Figure 6(right): Exterior of completed Dome House with Soleri inside. The double-shell dome, each shell on its own track,1949. Retrieved from Lissa McCullough, Conversations with Paolo Soleri. (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012).
Figure 7: Paolo Soleri, Mesa City—Higher Learning Complex, scroll of composite images, Higher Learning Center print series, early 1960s. As published originally in The Sketchbooks of Paolo Soleri (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1971), photograph by Ivan Pintar.
Figure 8: Robert Smithson, “Spiral Jetty” (1970), mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water, 1,500 feet x 15 feet (Collection of Dia Art Foundation, photograph by Charles Uibel/Great Salt Lake Photography, Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation, Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York)
Figure 9: Paolo Soleri, ‘The Automobile Mystique And The Asphalt Nightmare’. As published originally in Arcology: City in the Image of Man (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1969), photograph courtesy of the Cosanti Foundation.
Figure 10: Paolo Soleri, Plan of Arcosanti (Mesa topography). As published originally in Arcology: City in the Image of Man (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1969), photograph courtesy of the Cosanti Foundation.
Figure 11: Paolo Soleri, Section of Arcosanti (Mesa topography). As published originally in Arcology: City in the Image of Man (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1969), photograph courtesy of the Cosanti Foundation.
Figure 12. Paolo Soleri, Elevation of Arcosanti. As published originally in Arcology: City in the Image of Man (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1969), photograph courtesy of the Cosanti Foundation.
Figure 13: Paolo Soleri, detail, Macro-Cosanti Foundation Studies 2 and 3, 1964. Pastel, pencil, china ink, charcoal and color chalk on paper with gauze backing, 48 x 527 inches. Collection of the Cosanti Foundation. Retrieved from Cosanti Foundation/Soleri archives/David DeGomez.
Figure 14: Foundry Apse, West Housing, and the Vaults in the late afternoon light. As originally photographed by Ivan Pintar. Retrieved from Chris Malloy, “Step Inside This City of the Future That Time Forgot,” in Architectural Digest (7, March 2018).
Figure 15(left):Paolo Soleri, Arcosanti Vaults (1971/1975), view from the north. The Vaults are the midpoint of the Arcosanti site and design. This large public area provides space for events and meetings. As originally photographed by Yuki Yanagimoto. Retrieved from Chris Malloy, “Step Inside This City of the Future That Time Forgot,” in Architectural Digest (7, March 2018).
Figure 16(right): The outside shell of the Ceramics Apse was shaped over a form carved of fine silt. The apse faces south, allowing for shading in the summer from the sun straight overhead. In the winter months the sun is at a low angle, warming the interior of the apse. As originally photographed by Tomiaki Tamura. Retrieved from Chris Malloy, “Step Inside This City of the Future That Time Forgot,” in Architectural Digest (7, March 2018).
Figure 17(left): Interior view of a two-bedroom apartment on the west side of the foundry apse, living room with a window seat facing into the foundry work area. As originally photographed by Graziella Pazzanese. Retrieved from Chris Malloy, “Step Inside This City of the Future That Time Forgot,” in Architectural Digest (7, March 2018).
Figure 18(right): The cantilevered counter and the sitting area. As originally photographed by Julius Shulman in 1985.Retrieved from Karissa Rosenfield, “The Dome in the Desert by Wendell Burnette” in ArchDaily(14, April 2013)
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