Post date: Oct 13, 2013 8:57:4 PM
This was a post from the mid-2000s after 9/11, when I was exploring the city and visiting some friends.
What I saw--as I rapidly walked across the New York City getting lost several times in the process of trying to meet some people associated with Arcosanti alumni group--was a vitality in social interactions that there in many cases accentuates architecture to create what Paolo Soleri calls urban effect. I guess that's part of the reason I was attracted to Arcosanti. Part of me still wants to spend some time living in this city that has always fascinated me, and another part says that it is a little too intense, fast-paced, dehumanizing and EXPENSIVE to live in this city of 7 million.
Deep down I do not think that NYC is very healthy, cars are everywhere, there is little open space, and people become calloused amidst so many people. If you do not find your crowd in the city (in any city) you become lost among a mass of people, and you become distant from their essential humanity. Steven Budner one of the two people I met, spent 8 years in Brooklyn, and he seemed to echo these sentiments; it was reflected in his own experiences there.
Yet when I go to NY even for a day I cannot help but love the place despite what I feel are its flaws. I feel like I have some bond to the place. When I see all the people and activities I guess I have hope for humanity that we can find the common purpose to live and work together towards helping each other reach that common purpose that brings us together as a group of people. Is that not what building a community and even a city is all about, be it Arcosanti or NYC?
Looking at the chaos in our society, I feel that the sprawl and commercialism and the money driven values are a manifestation of some deep-seated problems and dysfunctions in our modern worldview. The struggle to create a just and humane society is not so much impeded by some foreign despot or terrorist, as with each of us and how we treat each other, and the systems and behaviors in society that we affirm and support by our own personal actions and inactions. I see this in how my family functions, in the people that come into my life even ever so briefly and I see it in me. I majored in political science, as a writer possibly some might say a naive one, because I thought that if I could put the right words together in my writing I could inspire people to actions that might reorient humanity away from its self-destructive tendencies.
Creating a Social Architecture
What made NYC what it is today was not ordinary occurrence. It was a cultural diffusion or convergence that has probably never been seen on the scale in which it took place in NYC. Because of this massive mixing of people that were inspired by an idealistic vision of America and NYC, a unique social dynamic was created that led to the creation of wonderful aesthetic, the skyline and culture that we associate with Manhattan. It is this aesthetic that inspires people from all over the world to come the NYC, and to enjoy it and in some cases participate in its evolution.
Like Paolo Soleri I see real change in the social dynamic as connected to creating comfortable, aesthetically compelling spaces for ourselves. Yet it is not enough to simply create a container, we must in the process of creating the aesthetically significant and compelling containers that encapsulate our sense of cultural identity, rise up to a higher spiritual and emotional state of existence. From this high culture we can move collectively towards the development of a critical mass of cultural interactions based on optimism, love and hope for all of humanity, from which a new ecologically sustainable and spiritually based culture can emerge. That is what I mean when I speak of a social architecture. Contemporary architecture reflects the cultural aspirations of a society in its most compelling and significant forms (much of Manhattan) while also representing repesenting the more mundune aspects of modern life in the monotonous, repetitive forms of suburbia. Yet I think that in order for us all to thrive in a society, we need to have authentic, distinctive and locally based aesthetic forms in our lives, for it is the architecture in our lives that gives us a sense of identity as humans. When we are surrounded by a dismal, repetitive architecture should we be surprised that so many feel that their lives are ordinary and dismal?