The architect John Jerde once offered to help Soleri build Arcosanti using a model for a spa like environment. in 2001 at the Paradox III Conference, one of his assistants Stephanie Smith spoke of this idea creating a spa like environment and that she felt it was central to healing and personal transformation. It was her ideas combined with Soleri that I considered this idea of EdenSpace.
Not in terms of bibical Adam and Eve but rather an alternative story one of co-creation around sacred union of male and female. Sacred because or when it is based on full trust and love for the other. Love between male and female can only exist in that way. There is no alternative and so that is what makes it sacred because it is full validation of the spirit form in the physical a coming together of they physical parts of male and female to make the whole - as of course in the spirit world there is no male of female! So this smybiology needs to be in our life and we need rituals to affirm this and yet it is missing. So because it is missing we are out of sync and not always aware of how to use our intuitions from the spiritual world because we dont have that other half helping to guide us (and this does not necessarily imply we have to find that physical union of the other half in traditional male female monogomous form but rather than we see and relate to the duality of life and affirm that in our existence through some ritual in our lives).
EdenSpace seeks to put the above mentioned ritual into place by creating an architecture that can serve as the vehicle for that ritual. This is my evolution of what Soleri terms the Urban Effect - something he describes as that byproduct of the convergence of people and things that make the city that place that is treasured. EdenSpace though challenges the conventional notion of urban by bringing nature back into the city overcoming the dichotomy between rural and urban. With modern technologies we now have the power to do things with the city that we have never before been able to do like build greenhouses right next to or even on top of the city.