Is Arcosanti a construction site or community that is a serious question for the future of Arcosanti.
In the early years when Paolo Soleri was an omnipresent force in the creation of Arcosanti many would venture out into the great abyss and they would somehow lead to the question to enter the collection mindspace of Arcosanti: is Arcosanti a community or construction site?
To which the answer from Paolo's mouth would almost undoubtably be Arcosanti is not a community its a construction site if you don't like how I do things here go find your own Mesa to build on.
So thus we find the old sentiment still alive in some people's minds despite the lessen of the hardened notion of Arcosanti not really being a real community.
Of course from the perspective of people like longtime Cosanti Foundation employee and board member Roger Tomalty it is the way it is, and to say anything else like it is a community is not reflecting the reality of Arcosanti or how it has developed. The fact is that Arcosanti was designed to operate like a company town. Of course the company in this case is a non profit foundation called Cosanti Foundation. So its more a NGO town.
But the course of the project has been developed for many years and so we should not be surprised that even once we start publicly using the world community and Arcosanti in the same sentence that it may not make it a real thriving community just by saying it is so. So in that way the old mantra lingers.
Of course this reflects the difficulty of an formally trained architect or I should say landscape architect designed and founding a community. Architects as trained under the capitalist economy model do tend to reflect those values and incorporate them not so consciously into the work they and its even reflected in the relationship they form with their peers, clients, students as well as the general public.