FROM: MAVERICK INVENTOR CHAPTER ?: THE NEW RURAL SOCIETY (excerpt) by Peter C. Goldmark & Lee Edson In the Arizona desert Paolo Soleri, the Italian-born artist, has devised something entirely different, a skyscraper structure of concrete and steel that may house as many as three thousand people. Soleri sees such structures-or arcologies, as he calls them- as places where people can live, work, and play in one compact area, leaving the rest of the land for natural vegetation and recreation. Another architectural solution, also modeled in Arizona, is being promulgated by the widow of the great architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and comprises a rock and redwood commune in which the people share the joys and labors of living in a setting that is architecturally harmonious with nature. Finally, a Florida architect, Jacques Fresco, has devised a kind of self-contained, one mile-in-diameter city arranged in the form of concentric rings of high-rise buildings interconnected by additional buildings, the whole project resembling the spokes of a wheel. Each ring is devoted to a different function such as working quarters, energy production, and recreation. In the dome-shaped center is a nucleus containing a giant computer that manages the automated facilities needed for inhabitants of the city. Dr. Fresco sees these complexes linked together like so many toadstools on a plain. . . |