Mass Urban

An essay by Will Holman at Design Observer that provides a thought-provoking glimpse into his experiences at three pioneering social design organizations: Arcosanti, the Rural Studio, and Youth Build, and points out the key challenge facing socially oriented architects and designers: how to make social design into a viable, mainstream professional field, as opposed to relying primarily on unpaid volunteers/interns and the nonprofit model.

” Lessons from the Front Lines of Social Design

Will Holman

I guess it was about 1993, though it’s hard to remember the exact year. Browsing the stacks of the Stoneleigh Elementary library one day, I came across the Kid’s Whole Future Catalog, a sort of Whole Earth Catalog for children. This bright book introduced me toBuckminster Fuller, Michael Reynolds and Paolo Soleri. At the age of nine, I decided to become an architect, and one day to travel to Soleri’s experiment in the Arizona desert, Arcosanti. As I went on to high school, and then architecture school at Virginia Tech, I kept reading about “alternative” builders and green design. My research was fueled by a growing sense of unease about my chosen profession, as the early aughts boomed with flashy towers in Dubai, Shanghai and New York. Everywhere I looked, suburbia was eating up the landscape — my hometown of Baltimore inexorably crept toward Washington, and Blacksburg, where I went to college, became a widening sea of blacktop and cheap garden apartments. 

In college, I spent summers working for a large firm in Baltimore. [1] I worked primarily in the healthcare studio, drafting elevations for nurse’s stations, editing door schedules and inputting revisions into floor plans. The days were long and dry, bookended by an hour-long commute on the city bus system. After graduation, I had a chance to walk into a job at that firm, but decided not to apply. I just couldn’t picture myself at that desk again, headphones on, redlines looming, working on corporate buildings. I thought the economy would keep on booming indefinitely, and, while young, I ought to have some adventures. Once I worked the restlessness out of my system, I could settle down and get a job at a good firm somewhere. 

Arcosanti
Three months after graduation, I found myself piloting my secondhand Corolla up a dirt road leading away from the Shell station in Cordes Junction, Arizona. In the distance, silhouetted against a clear sky, were the concrete vaults and cypress trees of Arcosanti. I was headed for a three-month internship [2] in the construction department; I stayed for a year, hired to lead a construction crew after my internship. My first month, I lived in a dorm with other interns. After that I moved into a concrete cube at the base of the mesa, one of the original pre-cast cabins that served as worker housing at Arco. There was a communal bathroom built into the back of a greenhouse, with a shower under a lemon tree. A fire ring in the center of all the cubes served as the evening entertainment. The small group who arrived that August for internships and workshops, including me, quickly became friends, as we spent nearly all our waking hours working together. 

Each morning, I rose around six and hiked up to the top of the mesa for breakfast at the café — toast, hard-boiled eggs, coffee. The construction crew had a brief meeting, and then we went to work. During most of my stay, I worked on a four-story retaining wall to shore up the shifting foundations of the pool, which cantilevered over the edge of a cliff. Over the decades, the cliff had eroded, so we used pre-cast concrete panels and poured-in place elements to hold the cliff in place while also providing a series of platforms, stairs, benches, planters and other elements that interacted with the landscape. We usually poured concrete once a week, spending the other four days preparing or stripping formwork and digging foundations. I learned to build formwork, mix concrete, siltcast [3] and weld. Once a week, Paolo Soleri would make the trek up from semi-retirement [4] in metro Phoenix to direct the placement of the next few pre-cast panels. Eventually I was allowed to design small parts of the project in the same improvisatory manner, sketching out ideas on scraps of wood. I loved the physical work, being in the sun, joking around with the ever-shifting crews, gaining strength, confidence and skills.”

Via: Design Observer

Photos: Left: Arcosanti, central Arizona. [Photo by Doctress Neutopia] Center: Rural Studio, H.E.R.O. Playground, Greensboro, Alabama. [Photo by Timothy Hursley] Right: YouthBuild Community Garden, Greensboro, Alabama. [Photo by Will Holman]