It is a reinstatement of the concept that the bridge between matter and spirit is matter becoming spirit and the process cannot be halted at any accidental moment, the present.
from The Omega Seed: An Eschatological Hypothesis (1981)
Paolo Soleri was an Italian-American visionary architect and lecturer in the College of Architecture at Arizona State University with a life-long commitment to research and experimentation in design and town planning. He spent a year and a half in fellowship with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West in Arizona, and at Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin.
He coined the term arcology, a portmanteau of “architecture” and “ecology,” a field of creating architectural design principles for very densely populated, ecologically low-impact human habitats. In 1970, he began constructing Arcosanti, an urban laboratory testing ground for this idea.
Among his more interesting legacies are the urban effect philosophy (or esthetogenesis: a description of the universe’s general propensity to reshape itself into complex conscious structures), and his extrapolation of a hypothetical cosmic endpoint called the Omega Seed, adapted from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the Omega Point.
Alphabetic
Date
Duration
Word Count
Popularity
Date
1969
Type
Book
Word Count
42,122
Reading time
≈ 3.9 hours
Quotes
15
Views
27,304
Visionary architect Paolo Soleri challenges us to think of cities as biological entities, and introduces a new urban living philosophy: the arcology, a city-sized organism of a thousand minds designed to exist in harmony with nature. Split into two sections, the book first explains the moral and economic necessity for humanity’s transition to arcological urban landscapes, and proposes that the general purpose of life is aesthetogenesis: the universe progressively complexifying and interconnecting, consciously reshaping itself into compassionate structures. In the second section, Soleri showcases 30 potential arcologies (including one space habitat) through the use of incredibly detailed diagrams, and explains how each was carefully designed to integrate itself economically and ecologically into the world.
Date
May 13, 2012
Type
Book
Word Count
18,381
Reading time
≈ 1.7 hours
Quotes
12
Views
1,551
Date
January 1, 1973
Type
Book
Word Count
61,277
Reading time
≈ 5.7 hours
Quotes
15
Views
747
This volume brings together the essays of Paolo Soleri in which he sets forth his philosophy of arcology (architecture ecology) and pleads for a new stage in the evolution of human society—a move toward compactness, or miniaturization, of our cities. To do so we must build solids rather than veneers; we must flee from a “flat” cityscape that debilitates and suppresses the individual. Arcologies, three dimensional macrostructures, are for populations of thousands or of millions.
Date
1981
Type
Book
Word Count
81,081
Reading time
≈ 7.5 hours
Quotes
66
Views
2,101
The Ωmega Seed brings together Paolo Soleri’s writings on eschatology, that branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of mankind. Soleri believes that the simulation of the divine will provide man with a blueprint for creation not only of our physical environment but also of a new stage in the evolution of mankind. His work is against the things of a materialistic society, toward a redesigning of the urban civilization of Earth.
Date
April 1985
Type
Essay
Word Count
3,367
Reading time
≈ 19 minutes
Views
191