John Jerde Partners Inc
Another great story associated with Paradox is the one about John Jerde. Jerde was a protege of Soleri's who very much was inspired by his Cosanti experience in the 60s as a young architect. He went on to do great things and to form his own relatively large architectural firm called Jerde Partners Inc based in Venice Beach employing about 100 people. However he was one of those architects who became known for doing big often billion dollar plus projects that were very commercialistic like the Bellagio in Los Vegas and Horton Plaza in San Diego. Ironic it is that he would be the one to come back to Soleri and basically say: "yes I'm successful now and I want to help you build this thing"...and of course with the caveat, "we have to do it my way because I know how to work with the big money people we'll to actually build a prototype Arcology project at Arcosanti."Â
My recollection was that Jerde wanted to create a development that appealed to the well to do and catered to their needs by create a stand alone Arcology spa. He felt this approach was needed to develop a viable enough business proposal to justify a large scale real estate development in building Arcosanti on some more ambitious level as seen in the Critical Mass and Acrosanti 5000 plans.
Can we be surprised again that nothing came of this "lead" as well. Despite Jerde wanting to turn away from a life of selling away his creative soul to the money-changers, he was not committed enough to work with his master and help him to achieve his dream of building the world's first prototype Arcology. Soleri the one who he so admired, whose drafting table he supposedly slept under and helped him to be a creative force in architecture - it was not enough to help him overcome this idea that Arcosanti can only be built by appealing to those same people who had made him such a success in architecture. Jerde most likely had been in-meshed in SoCal for too long and was talking a lot of new age type jargon, which probably did not mesh too well with the entrenched and inward oriented Arcosanti/Cosanti Foundation organizational culture. For example I recall that I first became aware of the term Co-Creative or Co-Creating from Jerde's team's writing and discussions during Paradox and remember discussing how the notion of so-called Co-Creative collaboration was not really Soleri's strongest asset. So I always the real reason nothing came of this collaboration between JPI and Cosanti Found had to do with the fact that they could not really understand each other because they were using different languages and had dramatically different points of view.
References:
P2P Foundation has a wiki that explains the differing meanings of Co-Creative: http://p2pfoundation.net/Co-Creation