FREE: MARIEVES MARVELS

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Marieves Marvels

"In nature, as an organism evolves it increases in complexity and it also becomes a more compact or miniaturized system. Similarly a city should function as a living system. Arcology, architecture and ecology as one integral process, is capable of demonstrating positive response to the many problems of urban civilization, population, pollution, energy and natural resource depletion, food scarcity and quality of life. Arcology recognizes the necessity of the radical reorganization of the sprawling urban landscape into dense, integrated, three-dimensional cities in order to support the complex activities that sustain human culture. The city is the necessary instrument for the evolution of humankind." —Paolo Soleri
Lean Alternative
Paolo Soleri calls what is happening in today’s green movement reformation. We put solar panels on a single family home but can’t change the impact of inefficient construction or the consumption inherent to moving around the suburbs. We buy hybrid cars but must drive in the gridlocks of daily commutes. We buy “green washed” products but continue the same hyper consumption that sprawl mandates. These improvements produce a “better kind of wrongness.”

Soleri suggests instead of reformation, we need reformulation of the way that we think about living and design for habitats that get to the root of the problem. Do we have enough land and other resources to sustain the current types of development? Does green consumerism get to the root of the problem? Could the American dream be reconsidered and reinvented? Arcology seeks to embody a “Lean Alternative” to hyper consumption and wastefulness through more frugal, efficient, smart, yet elegant city designs. Leanness is inherently obtainable via the miniaturization intrinsic to the Urban Effect.