The Bachelor’s Guide to Arcosanti
Looking for love and utopia in the American Southwest
I took a rare mental health day from work today. I had planned to spend my three-day weekend exploring the mountains north of Quartzsite, Arizona, but late last week heavy rains moved across the state for the first time in a year, so camping with any comfort was out of the question.
Instead, I decided to drive an hour north of Phoenix to visit Arcosanti–an experimental “urban laboratory” in the Arizona desert designed by architect Paolo Soleri in 1970 as a testing ground for future cities. Built on the idea of arcology—architecture + ecology—it’s an attempt to craft a compact, sustainable community with minimal impact on the local environment. I found the organization’s Instagram feed when I first moved to Arizona, and the site is a novelty I’ve been meaning to visit since then. I go with no expectations—as a friend used to say, “could be peaches, could be dog food.”
Once I clear the numbing sprawl of Phoenix on the I-17N, I feel some relief. Two years in, I am still adjusting to Arizona—the sprawl, the beige uniformity, the heat. I moved here for the desert and the promise of new landscapes to explore. It’s important that I take these days to reconnect with that desert soul. Life in Phoenix, alone, is not nearly enough to sustain me.
Greater Phoenix grows forever out instead of up. One would never know that this is a landscape of limited resources—particularly water—if you focused only on the new development rising in all directions. My own neighborhood is not even a mile from the center of downtown, and there are empty lots everywhere—an underutilized and underdeveloped city center where foot traffic crawls on the weekend. Who would bother to buy a 100-year-old home to renovate and care for when giant homes with two-car garages can be bought on the outskirts of the never-ending sprawl for less? Only a middle-aged gay guy and some idealistic boomers, that’s who. Many who call “Phoenix” their home live in adjoining cities like Tempe, Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert, Surprise, Sun City, Glendale—with their endless supply of fast food, strip malls, and shopping centers—and are likely never to step foot into Phoenix itself.
But enough of all of that; today I am driving 70 miles north to Arcosanti to look for inspiration.
I exit the highway and pass a QuikTrip when the paved road abruptly ends with a sign announcing Arcosanti. The road looks like many BLM roads in the desert—rough and rutted. After a mile or so, the concrete arcs I have seen on Instagram come into view.
At the facility, I climb the stairs to the gallery on the top floor of the visitor’s center where the tour will gather. I check in 30 minutes early, peruse the gallery and the art for sale, then decide to explore the rest of the building as I wait. On the way down the narrow stairs, I squeeze by a handsome man in his thirties wearing a trucker hat and blue shirt. He has a radiant smile. He’s reading the plaques on the wall that tell the history of this place.
He is still on the stairs reading the plaques as I squeeze by him again on my way back up from the restroom.
He says, “Hey, I’m just trying to figure out what this place is all about.”
I smile back, replying “same” in my most coquettish tone.
He grins again. “Well, I guess it’s all laid out here,” he says, nodding at the plaques.
I smile back and keep walking, fingers crossed that he’ll join us for the tour. Maybe, over the next hour, I’ll find myself standing next to him, tossing out a witty comment that makes him laugh. We’ll stick close, and at the end, we’ll grab a dirty chai made by hippies in the café, exchange numbers, and then—dates, adventures, marriage; this one is nearly in the bag!
Back on the top floor, I head over to the corner by the TV where the tour will start in ten minutes. As the designated hour ticks closer, the chairs fill up with a motley crowd: international tourists, retired boomers in sensible shoes, a handful of younger folks interested in sustainable design (their mismatched clothes give them away. After a decade in Oregon, I can hit them with a hacky sack from a mile away).
Already, this place feels like a print copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica from the 1970s’s—the decade I was born, back when AI was still a dream on a distant horizon. It’s nice to thumb through those old volumes and feel some nostalgia, but who really needs to lug all those heavy tomes home, and where would you even put them if you had them? Arcosanti strikes me the same way—a grand idea frozen in time, valuable for what it once meant. But maybe I’m wrong. I hope I am.
In the hangover of the 1960s, it’s easy to imagine the youthful idealism that still believed in utopian visions. But in 2025, we’re far too disillusioned to believe in utopias anymore. I can’t tell, yet, what the overall purpose of this place is, but I’m sure the video starting soon will clue me in.
The tourist beside me scrolls frantically on TikTok on his phone. He came all this way to play on his phone in an exotic location. Strange, but normal. Imagine living in a commune with this guy. I look around. The hunk in the hat and blue shirt is nowhere to be seen, and the tour is about to begin. A small pang of disappointment hits. I guess he’s not the one. The One will recognize me when he sees me and it’ll be pickups, puppy dogs, and amyl nitrate until the end of our days.
The kindly tour guide gives her welcome and starts the video. “Arcology—a term combining architecture and ecology,” the video drones. (This is going to get deep, y’all.) The dream began in 1970, but I didn’t need the video to tell me that; everything about this place reeks of the 1970s—that turbulent American decade after the dream of the ’60s died but before morning in America. Paolo Soleri, the architect behind it all, called for density, a radical departure from the sprawling expanse of Phoenix, America’s fourth-largest city. Soleri saw this ‘waste of space’ and wanted to design something different: a compact, efficient urban structure where commerce, community, and living coexist–and where the ubiquitous symbol of American progress (the automobile) would be de-centered. It’s a nice dream.
The video drones on. “We must rethink how we live, to minimize our impact on the earth.” Blah, blah, blah—it’s the same tired bullshit I’ve heard my whole life. Boomer doom and gloom, preaching about the collapse ahead while they clutch their wealth, titles, land, and housing with greedy fists. Like many Gen Xers raised in the shadow of their culture, I’ve gone numb to it. The paranoia rolls in right on cue: irreversible climate change, resource collapse, a dim, dire future none of us can fully buy into anymore. Arcosanti utopianism flickers into view—a dense city that climbs upward instead of sprawling out, stacking multi-use spaces like a Jenga tower: apartments perched over workshops, gardens wedged into odd corners, all squeezed onto 25 acres to house 5,000 souls. Some people have lived here for 50 years, the video tells us, drawn by that promise of a better way to live, but as the tour begins I wonder how many of them still believe.
Utopias are ancient ideals that have had a long hold on the American imagination. The American Arcadia ranges from the Shakers to the free-spirited hippies of The Farm in the 1970s. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about communes in The Blithedale Romance, sketching out the magnetic pull of these experiments and the human flaws that inevitably rip them apart. But in an age where disagreeing about which of the two choices for President you will vote for leads lifelong friends and brothers to stop speaking, the idea of the complex organization and emotional intelligence required to maintain a thriving community feels as exhausting as the Arizona sun in August.
The tour takes us through the site, and there are moments that are stunning, like the entryway outside the clay studio where giant yellow and red domes with fading paint loom overhead, their curved concrete forms casting sharp shadows. These apse-like structures, built using a silt-casting technique Soleri pioneered, are both shelter and art, designed to catch the desert breeze and keep the interiors cool. The whole place is perched on a mesa overlooking the Agua Fria River canyon, and the natural beauty is undeniable—rugged cliffs, harsh winds, the sky a restless blue. It’s only 80 degrees today, but I wonder how Arcosanti’s passive cooling works in the peak of summer. I have no desire to find out.
We see a few artists coming and going, practicing their craft in the open air. Most are making replicas of the wind chimes Soleri designed to fund his project when he first arrived in Arizona from Italy in the 1950s. The chimes, cast in bronze and ceramic, tinkle softly in the breeze—charming, but at $70 for the cheapest ones, they feel more like heirlooms you’d inherit than something you’d go in debt to acquire. I don’t take one home. The chap in the blue shirt is still nowhere to be seen.
In fact, husband material in our tour group is thi, though there are two men, probably in their 30s, who ask specific questions throughout the tour—“Have you ever cast in bronze? Did Soleri live here? What’s the energy output of the solar panels?”—and jot notes in journals and on tablets. They seem genuinely engaged, maybe architects or designers themselves. At the very end of the tour, I make eye contact with the more handsome of the two, and he grins big at me. I must be broadcasting today—single and ready to mingle—but the tour is over, and there will be no love sparked here on the cliffside of Arcosanti.
Soleri imagined this experiment swelling to a city of 5,000 people, but only about 50 live here today. The tour guide confesses at several points that the community is uncertain if expansion will ever happen. After 50 years, less than 5% of Soleri’s vision is complete, and this is the only site in the world that has been built. Many others were planned, each adapted to different landscapes, but Arcosanti is the sole laboratory to move from theory to physical.
So is Arcosanti a relic or a blueprint? The artists working in the shops believe in it (or at least they pretend to as they hide away from the world), but it’s hard to see how wind chimes and ceramics can sustain a city of the future. I’m glad places like Arcosanti exist, even if visiting them is a bit depressing. They speak to a time when Americans still dreamed of alternative futures and worked to build them—back when Soleri’s students poured concrete by hand, camping out in the desert to make his vision real.
Today, the closest we have is Burning Man and Black Rock City, that temporary city that grows to be the third largest city in the state of Nevada for a short while before it is dismantled and built again the following year. At Black Rock City, VIPs fly in on private jets and leave behind a mess of waste for others to dispose of, a far cry from Soleri’s sustainable ideals. Arcosanti, for all its flaws, is permanent—or at least it’s trying to be.
But the reality is that this dream, like the boomers who birthed it, will probably die soon. Who knows what will happen to that concrete fortress on the cliff? Maybe a few of its residents will live there until they die, their bodies mummifying in the desert heat, no one finding them amid the perfect views, the sound of wind chimes stirring in the breeze. Or maybe, just maybe, this city will become a prototype for housing on Mars, its compact design and resource efficiency a template for human survival beyond Earth.
After wandering the grounds for a while with no future husband with whom to build a utopia of my own in sight, I drive back down the rough dirt road out of the facility listening to “Time” by Pink Floyd. It seems fitting. I leave behind dreams of eco futurism and return to the Arizona desert bemused and befuddled, but still a bachelor.