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The Bridge between Matter & Spirit Is Matter Becoming Spirit: The Arcology of Paolo Soleri
The Bridge between Matter & Spirit Is Matter Becoming The Arcology of Paolo Soleri [Paperback]
- GenresDesign
253 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
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About the author
Paolo Soleri
52 books24 followersPaolo Soleri was an Italian architect. He established Arcosanti and the educational Cosanti Foundation. Soleri was a lecturer in the College of Architecture at Arizona State University and a National Design Award recipient in 2006.
Soleri authored six books, including The Omega Seed, and numerous essays and monographs.
Soleri authored six books, including The Omega Seed, and numerous essays and monographs.
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July 25, 2023
ESSAYS BY THE ARCHITECT BEHIND ARCOSANTI
Author and architect Paolo Soleri wrote in the Preface to this 1973 book, “The bridge between matter and spirit is MATTER BECOMING SPIRIT. This flow from the indefinite-infinite into the utterly subtle is the moving arch pouring physical matter into the godliness of conscious and metaphysical energy. This is the context, the place where we must begin anew. There are not really two shores and the chasm of irreconciliation in between, but there is an anchorage, the physical mooring and a radiance emanating from it. The physical mooring is ‘locally established’ at every instance of action. The radiance is the glow emitted whenever the metamorphosis of matter into spirit has begun… Technology is neither the mooring nor the radiance. It is a media useful in the actual transformation. It is matter manipulated into equipment for growth… The opposite of this functional emptiness is the concept of God, the pure spirit for whom the media has been obliterated and only the message-spirit remains… Then technology is not all there is… It is what there is that we can use to create a transtechnological universe…
“The technological methodology ever present when the process is active is threeheaded: complexity, miniaturization and their durational deployment. This is the trinity which makes the stone glow and become spirit. In their absence even God becomes a weak, tenuous, simplistic hypothesis… Technology … as the resolver of one-at-a-time aspects of a problem that, is always far more faceted and outreaching than any of each of its aspects…
“This group of papers spanning about ten years are related to one another through the conviction that as there is more to man than economics, politics, survival, and the pursuit of happiness, there better be more in the physical environment than what man (Western man and non-Western man) is bent on doing now. That the unbroken spiral that has brought spirit out of stone is still climbing upward and the instrumentality he needs in this miraculous pursuit must be up to the task.”
He states, “There are two kinds of information: The synthetic and the environmental. The synthetic informations, when linked one to another, tend to breed savagery in a degree related to the power they can muster and use. Misinformation breeds obscurantism. On the other hand, the environmental information becomes knowledge. That is to say, it is integrally lived, suffered. Suffered because in the end it coincides with the residual anguish. The latter is the stuff on which the truly human side of man feeds for a transfigurative act. By it structure becomes form. Such act is part of the compassion-esthetic process.” (Pg. 27)
He observes, “The possible condition of equity achievable in them is not validated into the ecological condition of congruence. In the present metropolitan fabric, the absence of the implosion of miniaturization makes the social organism ill-fitted for survival, let alone for development. The environment of contemporary man is a statistical utopia taken in by the game of laissez-faire. As such it tends to make man abstract.” (Pg. 42-43)
He answers the question, ‘Can arcology fit within an existing city,’ “Yes, inasmuch as something healthier can supplant a decaying organism. It would depend upon the relative size and power of the two systems. It would depend upon the autonomous power given to the arcology and to its ability to control its own buffer zone; the open spaces belonging to its inhabitants. It would depend on the quality and substance of its linkage to the city and the country. It would depend essentially on the inner quality of the arcology itself reflected by the liveliness of the society developing in it. One clearly positive aspect is the almost 50 percent reduction of ‘dislocation’ of population from the dislocation in a comparative urban renewal project. This is so because the building site for arcology is minimal, which means practically no dislocation of population in the construction phase of the arcology.” (Pg 54)
He notes, “We are headed for an existence wherein materiality, short of being esthetically transfigured, will physically add to such a burden of false needs and waste as to cause pernicious anemia on the spiritual body, a progressive atrophy of its sensitivity, a pervasive dulling of its life. All this possibly within a polished and opulent civilization. Nature, divinity and conscience, our fathers, have told us that we live poorly and that effect and cause in one, our environment, is chaotic or downright squalid. Now technology, our enfant terrible, is sarcastically watching the destruction of whatever little we had of order and coherence by the frantic use we make of her expensive prodigality. If all we can do is to transform materiality into materialism, the long-sought blessing of quasi-total leisure may well be a sharp turn for the worse in the history of man.” (Pg. 79-80)
He states, “To maintain that psychological man is separate or more important than environmental (somatic) man is non-sensical, as it considers man as nothing more than an abstraction of his mind. Psychological man is the offspring of somatic man as ‘social psyche’ is the offspring of social soma, the characterization of the biological society by the environmental (physical) pressures. The distrust, borne by a too easily disillusioned youth, for anything that stands between two souls or between a multitude of them (Woodstock) has had the negative effect of making a desert for somatic man in which sterility the psyche will supposedly blossom.” (Pg. 127)
He explains, “I will be the first to advocate a return to nature, but my understanding of nature both in general and in detail is foreign to the used and abused slogans. When I think of natural man, my senses and my mind work out a world that I must label, if that were useful, as radical and conservative. Radical, because I must step back into the context of nature … so as to anchor myself to the roots of things. Conservative, because in my ignorance, a portion of the mountainous ignorance of the species, I take as my first duty to do the least I can of anything that might upset that balance I see and yet do not comprehend. Conservative and radical, because the little I see which is unequivocal in the evolution of life, I want to apply unequivocally to the furthering of it… the way nature moves and the way we go are not congruent.” (Pg. 149)
He asks, “the only honest, realistic, pragmatic question is: Does this or that thing foster the spirit or does it not? If it does not, it is ‘authentically’ certain that it is a pollutant. If it were not so, the whole, the totality of the phenomenon of life from the purely ‘mineral’ ecology of the original solar system to the ecology of today… is a fiction, a farce, a fraud, a devastation not extant, non-real. Then each of our actions, especially those collectively 0erformed, must be seen through a different ‘truth filter’ as if looking at a landscape through infrared light.” (Pg. 187)
He explains, “In Arcomedia I am attempting to reconnect the naked mind to the body. I do so by linking the audio-visual to the physical universe expressed by the environment and by compelling the spectator, not into doing his own thing, which he can do on other occasions, but into being invested by visual and acoustic phenomena of traceable contextual and existential nature: the ongoing of nature around and within ourselves.” (Pg. 226-227)
If you want to know more about the man behind the architecture, this book will be helpful.
Author and architect Paolo Soleri wrote in the Preface to this 1973 book, “The bridge between matter and spirit is MATTER BECOMING SPIRIT. This flow from the indefinite-infinite into the utterly subtle is the moving arch pouring physical matter into the godliness of conscious and metaphysical energy. This is the context, the place where we must begin anew. There are not really two shores and the chasm of irreconciliation in between, but there is an anchorage, the physical mooring and a radiance emanating from it. The physical mooring is ‘locally established’ at every instance of action. The radiance is the glow emitted whenever the metamorphosis of matter into spirit has begun… Technology is neither the mooring nor the radiance. It is a media useful in the actual transformation. It is matter manipulated into equipment for growth… The opposite of this functional emptiness is the concept of God, the pure spirit for whom the media has been obliterated and only the message-spirit remains… Then technology is not all there is… It is what there is that we can use to create a transtechnological universe…
“The technological methodology ever present when the process is active is threeheaded: complexity, miniaturization and their durational deployment. This is the trinity which makes the stone glow and become spirit. In their absence even God becomes a weak, tenuous, simplistic hypothesis… Technology … as the resolver of one-at-a-time aspects of a problem that, is always far more faceted and outreaching than any of each of its aspects…
“This group of papers spanning about ten years are related to one another through the conviction that as there is more to man than economics, politics, survival, and the pursuit of happiness, there better be more in the physical environment than what man (Western man and non-Western man) is bent on doing now. That the unbroken spiral that has brought spirit out of stone is still climbing upward and the instrumentality he needs in this miraculous pursuit must be up to the task.”
He states, “There are two kinds of information: The synthetic and the environmental. The synthetic informations, when linked one to another, tend to breed savagery in a degree related to the power they can muster and use. Misinformation breeds obscurantism. On the other hand, the environmental information becomes knowledge. That is to say, it is integrally lived, suffered. Suffered because in the end it coincides with the residual anguish. The latter is the stuff on which the truly human side of man feeds for a transfigurative act. By it structure becomes form. Such act is part of the compassion-esthetic process.” (Pg. 27)
He observes, “The possible condition of equity achievable in them is not validated into the ecological condition of congruence. In the present metropolitan fabric, the absence of the implosion of miniaturization makes the social organism ill-fitted for survival, let alone for development. The environment of contemporary man is a statistical utopia taken in by the game of laissez-faire. As such it tends to make man abstract.” (Pg. 42-43)
He answers the question, ‘Can arcology fit within an existing city,’ “Yes, inasmuch as something healthier can supplant a decaying organism. It would depend upon the relative size and power of the two systems. It would depend upon the autonomous power given to the arcology and to its ability to control its own buffer zone; the open spaces belonging to its inhabitants. It would depend on the quality and substance of its linkage to the city and the country. It would depend essentially on the inner quality of the arcology itself reflected by the liveliness of the society developing in it. One clearly positive aspect is the almost 50 percent reduction of ‘dislocation’ of population from the dislocation in a comparative urban renewal project. This is so because the building site for arcology is minimal, which means practically no dislocation of population in the construction phase of the arcology.” (Pg 54)
He notes, “We are headed for an existence wherein materiality, short of being esthetically transfigured, will physically add to such a burden of false needs and waste as to cause pernicious anemia on the spiritual body, a progressive atrophy of its sensitivity, a pervasive dulling of its life. All this possibly within a polished and opulent civilization. Nature, divinity and conscience, our fathers, have told us that we live poorly and that effect and cause in one, our environment, is chaotic or downright squalid. Now technology, our enfant terrible, is sarcastically watching the destruction of whatever little we had of order and coherence by the frantic use we make of her expensive prodigality. If all we can do is to transform materiality into materialism, the long-sought blessing of quasi-total leisure may well be a sharp turn for the worse in the history of man.” (Pg. 79-80)
He states, “To maintain that psychological man is separate or more important than environmental (somatic) man is non-sensical, as it considers man as nothing more than an abstraction of his mind. Psychological man is the offspring of somatic man as ‘social psyche’ is the offspring of social soma, the characterization of the biological society by the environmental (physical) pressures. The distrust, borne by a too easily disillusioned youth, for anything that stands between two souls or between a multitude of them (Woodstock) has had the negative effect of making a desert for somatic man in which sterility the psyche will supposedly blossom.” (Pg. 127)
He explains, “I will be the first to advocate a return to nature, but my understanding of nature both in general and in detail is foreign to the used and abused slogans. When I think of natural man, my senses and my mind work out a world that I must label, if that were useful, as radical and conservative. Radical, because I must step back into the context of nature … so as to anchor myself to the roots of things. Conservative, because in my ignorance, a portion of the mountainous ignorance of the species, I take as my first duty to do the least I can of anything that might upset that balance I see and yet do not comprehend. Conservative and radical, because the little I see which is unequivocal in the evolution of life, I want to apply unequivocally to the furthering of it… the way nature moves and the way we go are not congruent.” (Pg. 149)
He asks, “the only honest, realistic, pragmatic question is: Does this or that thing foster the spirit or does it not? If it does not, it is ‘authentically’ certain that it is a pollutant. If it were not so, the whole, the totality of the phenomenon of life from the purely ‘mineral’ ecology of the original solar system to the ecology of today… is a fiction, a farce, a fraud, a devastation not extant, non-real. Then each of our actions, especially those collectively 0erformed, must be seen through a different ‘truth filter’ as if looking at a landscape through infrared light.” (Pg. 187)
He explains, “In Arcomedia I am attempting to reconnect the naked mind to the body. I do so by linking the audio-visual to the physical universe expressed by the environment and by compelling the spectator, not into doing his own thing, which he can do on other occasions, but into being invested by visual and acoustic phenomena of traceable contextual and existential nature: the ongoing of nature around and within ourselves.” (Pg. 226-227)
If you want to know more about the man behind the architecture, this book will be helpful.
May 30, 2019
The Bridge Between Matter & Spirit is Matter Becoming Spirit: The Arcology of Paolo Soleri by Paolo Soleri: when I saw the title, I became interested in learning what he had to say.
Arcology (architecture and ecology) is the name adopted to identify a structure which is (somehow) a three-dimensional landscape or topology. . . Arcologies are architecture organisms of such character and dimensions as to be ecologically relevant (p. 46).
I propose that a radical departure from the hopeless tangle of our urban centers seems a physical imperative, socially urgent, culturally mandatory, and historically (evolutionarily) timely (p. 19).
It is as if the spirit of which matter is soaked, saturated will come to life and activate itself only when exuded out of the structure of matter itself through the formidable pressure of complexification-miniaturization (p. 40).
This is a way of saying that pure spirit has no physical dimension, or for a material-agnostic that spirit is not, as spirit has not physical dimensions (p. 57).
Civitate Dei becoming Godlike . . . God himself. The infinite complexity of a being utterly centered upon itself infinitely powerful and infinitely wise (by definition as it is spirit) (p. 65).
Of all the manifestations we know of, the human species embodies more intensely than all others this thrust toward 'ethereal life' (p. 190).
The spirit incorporated in man stands as the asentropic* arrowhead of the spiral of life (p. 191). [*Buckminster Fuller?]
There is a methodology to the 'transformation' of matter into spirit. What is evident of this methodology is the direct dependence of the phenomenon on the complexity it can instrumentalize itself it with. And there is an overwhelming documentation (evolution) of the fact that ultimately spirit is qualitative; thanks to the miniaturization humbly working at the nuts and bolts of complexity. This is the natural order of things, as life is totally dependent on information and the appropriate responses information elicits about itself and itself as part of the environment (p. 192).
The individual effort of 'imploding' around the seed a co-operative organism is more that analogically repeated in a 'cosmic' scale where the total semen of life, while genetically evolving, is painfully but powerfully gathering, impulsively, the universe of mass-energy into one creature, temporarily. earthly, futurely transworldly. In between those two poles--the person and realized, and the totality of the spirit, potential and improbable--stands the city of the present, a raw prototype of what can be the Civitate Dei in it's becoming (p. 194).
Arcology (architecture and ecology) is the name adopted to identify a structure which is (somehow) a three-dimensional landscape or topology. . . Arcologies are architecture organisms of such character and dimensions as to be ecologically relevant (p. 46).
I propose that a radical departure from the hopeless tangle of our urban centers seems a physical imperative, socially urgent, culturally mandatory, and historically (evolutionarily) timely (p. 19).
It is as if the spirit of which matter is soaked, saturated will come to life and activate itself only when exuded out of the structure of matter itself through the formidable pressure of complexification-miniaturization (p. 40).
This is a way of saying that pure spirit has no physical dimension, or for a material-agnostic that spirit is not, as spirit has not physical dimensions (p. 57).
Civitate Dei becoming Godlike . . . God himself. The infinite complexity of a being utterly centered upon itself infinitely powerful and infinitely wise (by definition as it is spirit) (p. 65).
Of all the manifestations we know of, the human species embodies more intensely than all others this thrust toward 'ethereal life' (p. 190).
The spirit incorporated in man stands as the asentropic* arrowhead of the spiral of life (p. 191). [*Buckminster Fuller?]
There is a methodology to the 'transformation' of matter into spirit. What is evident of this methodology is the direct dependence of the phenomenon on the complexity it can instrumentalize itself it with. And there is an overwhelming documentation (evolution) of the fact that ultimately spirit is qualitative; thanks to the miniaturization humbly working at the nuts and bolts of complexity. This is the natural order of things, as life is totally dependent on information and the appropriate responses information elicits about itself and itself as part of the environment (p. 192).
The individual effort of 'imploding' around the seed a co-operative organism is more that analogically repeated in a 'cosmic' scale where the total semen of life, while genetically evolving, is painfully but powerfully gathering, impulsively, the universe of mass-energy into one creature, temporarily. earthly, futurely transworldly. In between those two poles--the person and realized, and the totality of the spirit, potential and improbable--stands the city of the present, a raw prototype of what can be the Civitate Dei in it's becoming (p. 194).
November 16, 2013
This is a brilliant book,unfortunately hard to find a replacement copy.
I need to find one.
I need to find one.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews