Lessons from the Front Lines of Social Design

I guess it was about 1993, though it’s hard to remember the exact year. Browsing the stacks of the Stoneleigh Elementary library one day, I came across the Kid’s Whole Future Catalog, a sort of Whole Earth Catalog for children. This bright book introduced me to Buckminster Fuller, Michael Reynolds and Paolo Soleri. At the age of nine, I decided to become an architect, and one day to travel to Soleri’s experiment in the Arizona desert, Arcosanti. As I went on to high school, and then architecture school at Virginia Tech, I kept reading about “alternative” builders and green design. My research was fueled by a growing sense of unease about my chosen profession, as the early aughts boomed with flashy towers in Dubai, Shanghai and New York. Everywhere I looked, suburbia was eating up the landscape — my hometown of Baltimore inexorably crept toward Washington, and Blacksburg, where I went to college, became a widening sea of blacktop and cheap garden apartments.

In college, I spent summers working for a large firm in Baltimore. [1] I worked primarily in the healthcare studio, drafting elevations for nurse’s stations, editing door schedules and inputting revisions into floor plans. The days were long and dry, bookended by an hour-long commute on the city bus system. After graduation, I had a chance to walk into a job at that firm, but decided not to apply. I just couldn’t picture myself at that desk again, headphones on, redlines looming, working on corporate buildings. I thought the economy would keep on booming indefinitely, and, while young, I ought to have some adventures. Once I worked the restlessness out of my system, I could settle down and get a job at a good firm somewhere.

Arcosanti
Three months after graduation, I found myself piloting my secondhand Corolla up a dirt road leading away from the Shell station in Cordes Junction, Arizona. In the distance, silhouetted against a clear sky, were the concrete vaults and cypress trees of Arcosanti. I was headed for a three-month internship [2] in the construction department; I stayed for a year, hired to lead a construction crew after my internship. My first month, I lived in a dorm with other interns. After that I moved into a concrete cube at the base of the mesa, one of the original pre-cast cabins that served as worker housing at Arco. There was a communal bathroom built into the back of a greenhouse, with a shower under a lemon tree. A fire ring in the center of all the cubes served as the evening entertainment. The small group who arrived that August for internships and workshops, including me, quickly became friends, as we spent nearly all our waking hours working together.