Paolo Soleri celebrated his 87th. Birthday this week at Arcosanti. Staff, visitors, and members of Paolo's "School of Thought" gathered for the traditional "frugal soup," in which Paolo cooks and serves his "frugal soup," a healthy but small meal to remind us of the great inequities remaining in our world.

During his long and productive life, Paolo has been an inspiration for many people around the world, especially those of us who have had the good fortune to know him personally. (I spent several years in the early-90's studying and working with him at Arcosanti.)

Paolo is a world-class philosopher as well as a brilliant and creative architect. He points out that while a plumbing system is one part of designing a house, good plumbing alone is not sufficient to transform a house into a home. Designing a home that can provide a good environment for raising the next generation requires that numerous additional factors be taken into account, including the psychosocial aspects of the family and of its surrounding culture, a process I call architectonics. Similarly, Paolo defines the purpose of an arcology as "an instrument for the evolution of humankind" toward an eschatological Divine state he calls the Omega Seed. He represents this in his "Bubble Diagram," which includes behavior ranging from "Political Correctness" to "Cosmic Relevance."

One project Paolo and I worked on was to found Arcosanti's "School of Thought" (SOFT), weekly meetings with Paolo to discuss his Theory of Arcology, which have become a tradition which continues today. Here's an example of Paolo's writing which has been discussed in SOFT meetings.

MCD (Miniaturization, Complexification, Duration)

In the universe we belong, a universe in which Spacetime is the agent "manipulating" the media, Mass-Energy, into Being, the MCD triad is critically determinant in creating Being, the past. MC is the binary methodology by way of which reality is inching toward self-consciousness, the mind. As mass-energy is unrelentingly stirred by spacetime in ways that generate more and more information-knowledge (complexity) contained in less and less spacetime (miniaturization), reality witnesses the mineral memory at first, then the genetic memory and "finally" the cultural memory. Duration is taking hold, in the sense that the past (reality) sees more and more fragments of itself being "relived", being remembered. Perfect remembering is tantamount to a Second Coming. The day I will be remembered in all the details of my becoming that day I will be resurrected. It goes without saying that this could only happen in a reality "purged" of spacetime. We call this reality the past. The past as the only being.

It took me 15 pages to analyze the meaning of this one paragraph in the context of modern scientific thought, for the introduction to Paolo's latest hard cover, coffee table size book, called What If?, Collected Writings 1986-2000. Here's part of a review of this beautiful book, which I highly recommend as an inspiring overview of Paolo's philosophy. Interestingly, Paolo's ideas are compatible in many ways with Sri Aurobindo's thinking:

... The composition and design of What If? is as distinct and inventive as the monumental cities proposed by its author. The text is accompanied by a four-color marginal commentary, pulled from Soleri's daily writings, which emphasizes, illuminates - and sometimes calls into question - the arguments presented in the body of the work. Soleri's trademark diagrams and illustrations provide a visual entryway to the ideas within, while additional sections delve still deeper, through personal journal entries and a thorough glossary, into such essential Soleri ideas as Arcology, Complexity, Miniaturization, Duration, Frugality, Better Kind of Wrongness, The Omega Seed, Howness and The Urban Effect.

A foreword by Harry Rand, of the Smithsonian Institution, on Soleri the artist and an extensive introductory essay by Ron Anastasia on the relationship of Soleri's work to modern scientific thought and theory serve to contextualize the writings and their significance in today's world. ...

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