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)
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.
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.
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.
