July 1, Cordes Junction, Arizona. July 29, Taos, New Mexico

I arrived at Interstate 17 on State Route 69 from Prescott disgruntled that, despite the single red line on my recent road map, the Highway Department had snuffed out another rural highway to make an expressway, bringing more cars to Prescott to drown its charming old town in sprawl and exhaust fumes. But I had consolation in a not-yet city whose exotic name had lured me to this spot.

Route 69 ends at the Interstate. However, my point of interest lay opposite the freeway. Negotiating the snarling on-and-off ramps across the freeway challenged even this traffic-seasoned pedaler. Beyond that gauntlet, approaching a huge fuel plaza and scattered ranchettes, a small sign with an arrow caught my attention. I followed it up the narrowing frontage road to a second sign: "Arcosanti 2 miles."

Shortly the pavement and Cordes Junction's ranchettes ended. Still I hadn't seen a trace of the concrete vaults and cypress trees that show in photos of the place. Glad for deep-grooved cross tires, I ground ahead, steering for what appeared the smoothest swaths in the washboard road. I finally glimpsed rounded and rectangular-cast concrete and a crane.

I got the closest space and locked my steel companion to the post of a visitor information sign. Scrambling across my toes, an overfed bandit ground squirrel threw a tantrum. The tinkling of wind-struck bells offset the rodent's scolding.

To the squirrel's consternation, I helped myself to a couple handfuls of dry-roasted peanuts, leaving it none, then bit into an apple. Munching, I turned down the path to the visitor center.

The trail winds over rimrock. Not until this point did I glimpse buildings from the foundation up. Rooted in talus, a rectangular structure of reinforced concrete reared higher than its width to about the rim's elevation. A pedestrian bridge led from the trail to a balcony concourse outside a middle story of this structure. This tower housed the visitor center and a cafe.

Alight from the bridge, I chatted with other visitors. Despite severe sunlight at the trailhead, here, shaded by a stairwell and blandished by a steady updraft, we took leisure to banter before entering.

I finished my apple but ignored the first trash can I saw on a hunch that I'd find a compost receptacle for the first time on this trip. Inside the visitor center, my senses stretched my credulity that so stimulating yet comfortable space could be shaped of concrete, sunlight and wind. Cycling the southwest, I dreaded daily grocery stops because of the sudden shift from torrid outdoors to super cooled interiors. For motorists arriving in air conditioned vehicles, the gauntlet is not the chill on entering the market but the hot race across the tarmac. Entering Arcosanti wasn't so abrupt. I adapted to cooler air outdoors. Moreover, the coolness inside the tower wasn't so insistently fossil-fueled "room temperature" as elsewhere.

Though darker inside than the full sun without, plenty of light shone, mostly through strategically placed windows and skylights. The vertiginous entry by human-scale bridge resounded in the inside's open shaft. The visitor center forms a wide gallery around the inside of the tower. In the center of this space, one can look over a railing to the next story below. Several floor fans invigorated the air and agitated vanes of wind bells hung above the central railing.

I ran down (or was it up?) stairs to the cafe. By a stand where customers bus their trays, sure enough, I found a bucket of food scraps used for composting. Feeling lighter by more than the apple core, I returned for my ticket on the next tour.

At the tour’s starting place, twenty to thirty chairs faced a scale model in the corner. But the model didn't look much like what I had seen of the project. The tour guide pointed to a black line around some of the buildings, explaining that structures outside the line had yet to be built and represented architect Paolo Soleri's vision for the city. The line ringed a mere token of what would be built according to the plan.

Soleri's vision of a city where 5,000 people work, reside and play among dense buildings could not only offer lifestyle alternatives to acquiring manufactured surfeit, but would preserve most of the thousands of acres belonging to the city in an undeveloped state both for its own sake and for the mental health of city inhabitants. His design—a forthright rejection of prevailing conceptions of wealth, happiness and the purpose of communal living which have shaped American cities—implies solutions to the crime, pollution, alienation and grinding poverty that blight our cities.

Our guide's contrasting of Soleri's ideas to the waste and squalor of our current cities energized me. Nodding and asking questions, I felt mad that my Birkenstock-shod peers on this tour, whose age suggested having been aware during the sixties, seemed so unmoved.

Outside, we strolled east among other structures at the mesa crest. First we surveyed one of two great apses, inverted half bowls cocked toward the equator like giant bears' ears. In summer, the apses shade outdoor work and performance spaces. They are also situated where the wind's velocity peaks at the crest of the mesa. The sun's winter retreat exposes floor space under the apse until at the solstice it catches full sun.

A team of potters worked in the apse's shade. In designing Arcosanti, Soleri conceived a city to amplify on-site amenities nature itself provides to render human comfort. To this ecologically conscious architecture he applies his coinage arcology.

Another structure that makes the most of summer winds is a huge breezeway that spreads a concrete floor wide enough for a flea market, a roller rink or a dance floor all with natural air conditioning. Perpendicular to this promenade, a breezeway in which three or four might walk abreast led eastward. A built-in bench lines the south wall of this deeply shaded passageway.

Prepossessing details in even the existing city's small spread could easily fill photographic tomes. But the image most evoking life in such an eventual city occurred in this cool corridor. On the bench, someone had chalked 64 alternating light and dark squares. Upon these squares sparred ranks of ceramic chessmen. No one sat on either side of the improvised board. That the contenders would so casually leave everything believing it would be there to resume at their convenience declared that, in this public space, trust prevailed. Such respect bolsters the value of public space. If I could feel so at ease in common space, less private space might suffice.

We passed on to an amphitheater behind which spaces for private apartments radiated. A taut shroud sloped toward the stage, and between columns of seats, tile-lined channels ran. The guide explained that during performances water ran down the channels providing both a psychological and evaporative source of cooling. A pool in front of the stage gathered the radial rivulets. The shroud could be furled, allowing audiences to bask on cooler days.

Around the back side of the amphitheater stage, behind sliding glass doors, a recital room, appointed with a grand piano, surveyed the north-facing rimrock opposite Arcosanti's rim. This room appeared especially sunny for winter impromptus.

Outside the recital room and directed toward the southeast horizon, several tiers of stepped recesses resembled another amphitheater except that these seats tilted back 30 degrees or more. This seating, our guide explained, had been designed for stargazing. Seating myself, leaning back and imagining peering into the Milky Way, I wondered. Why hadn't I guessed the bleachers' purpose from their form? Their tilt reminded me of planetarium seats. But here, stars passed in unhurried sidereal time. More than an hour north of Phoenix and on the high desert, Arcosanti offers spectacular stargazing. With its compact footprint and minimal need for random outdoor lighting, the city could maintain a window on the cosmos. Devoted to that light show, this public space made a concrete investment in that amenity.

Earthship

Northwest of Taos, a gently tilted plain grows sagebrush and hides the sheer thousand foot drop to the Rio Grande until US 64 is all but on the bridge across. After pausing mid span to look up, down, and all around and to tell a curious motored tourist about my trip, I started up a similar plain west of the river. Where the highway jogs north, a motorcycle diverted my attention to a dirt road left of the highway. Shortly, a chorus of greetings to my right with a German accent broke my westward gaze.

My accosters stood in a dirt drive next to a vintage pickup. I stopped to say hello and noticed a sign propped on the pickup's rear fender proclaiming this as earthship headquarters. Familiar with earthships—houses constructed facing south with a wall on the north side made of discarded, earth-filled tires—I thanked the German family. If they hadn't called out, I would have pedaled past without an inkling of what I had missed.

I followed signs down a pathway to the entrance of the demonstration earthship. A representative of the builder greeted me in the first of two larger chambers that make up most of the structure's floor space. The room had rounded corners instead of boxy right angles. The tires slept hidden by molded, cement-solid rammed earth. A linseed tinge freshened the air. My host started a videotape which explained that the linseed oil had been used to darken the walls and make them more readily absorb and store sunlight for release through the night. The tape, narrated by Dennis Weaver, the architect who developed the Earthship concept, explored the systems which make the houses virtually self-sufficient. Precipitation on the south-facing solar-collecting panes was stored in a large indoor cistern. From here residents could filter drinking and cooking water. Photovoltaic panels charged batteries for household power.

Technology for disposing of wastewater was, claimed the video, rapidly changing. Greywater (wastes from sinks and showers) trickled below planters just below the angled, south-facing windows. The plants drew nutrients from the water, and their roots harbored organisms that speed the decomposition of organic matter. Urine, collected separately from feces, would enrich outdoor plantings. After being dried in a special solar chamber, feces would be incinerated.

This demonstration home attested to how much the technology had changed. Flushed with processed greywater, its low-flow conventional toilet connected to septic tank and drainfield.

I spoke with the host after a turn about the compound including two other earthships. From her office she had watched a banana plant, grown in the greywater planter, flower. In February, with snow outside, she and colleagues were harvesting bananas.

I lingered in the first large chamber, running my hand over the hardened earth walls. Though the day had been mostly overcast, the walls' thermal mass had nonetheless gathered some solar glow. Though I couldn't see the ceiling's shadow, I felt it as a line between warm and cool. It reminded me of walking a Modesto parking lot barefoot on a summer evening and having my toes inform me where shadows had been. But here, beyond mere curiosities, these differences of light and shadow were essential to household comfort. To be sure, a hearth supplemented this passive solar heating, but without the solar element residents would spend more on the fire.

I resumed my jaunt toward Tres Piedras cogitating over new perplexities. The guide at Arcosanti (see last month’ Connections) had said the city wasn't designed for puristic self-sufficiency but for efficiency. Though they certainly had a much lower profile than an ordinary ranch house, the earthships dotting the plain beyond the demonstration site still had dirt roads connecting them to the highway. With no parallel power lines, they were easier on the landscape. Still, I wondered how many of the scattered earthship homesteaders were self-sufficient enough to let any grass sprout in the roads between trips to town for provisions, business or culture.

I regretted part of the earthship video pitch suggesting security as a reason to move in to an earthship. Not so much a ship, then, as Arcosanti strove to be, but a lifeboat for those fleeing sinking cities. I felt dissatisfaction in both arrangements. Arcosanti is still far from a self-contained city, not yet sustaining so much as a post office. Residents still must drive to essential services. I was mystified that it wasn't designed to generate its own modest power demands rather than hooking up to the power grid.

The earthship homestead seemed too allied with the suburban ideal of a home at the end of the road, distance drowning the city's troubles. To socialize beyond the household would typically involve miles of driving.