PAOLO SOLERI'S EARTH CASTING
FOR SCULPTURE, MODELS AND CONSTRUCTION
Paolo Soleri and Scott M. Davis
Paolo Soleri and Scott M. Davis: PAOLO SOLERI'S EARTH CASTING FOR SCULPTURE, MODELS AND CONSTRUCTION. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Books, 1984. First edition. oblong quarto. Publishers printed wrappers. Color endsheets. 116 pp. Fully illustrtaed with black and white photographs and schematics. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Minor shelf wear to front panel including a tear on the bottom fore edge, a crease, and a skinned area the size of a quarter. A very good copy.
8.5 x 5.5 soft cover book 116 pages illustrated with many black-and-white illustrations and schematics: Paolo Soleri, well known for his unorthodox architectural concepts, has developed he techniques of using earth and silt for crafts, sculpture, and construction. "Earth Casting" is a workbook and manual for artisans, builders, and those who want to experiment with earth-casting techniques as developed by Soleri at Cosanti and Arcosanti, in Arizona.
From the website for floornature: After graduating from Politecnico di Torino, the Polytechnic Institute in Turin, in 1946, Soleri moved to the US, where he worked in Taliesin West, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s studios. When he returned to Italy he opened Fabbrica di Ceramiche Solimene in Vietri sul Mare (Salerno) before going back to the US to settle in Paradise Valley, Arizona.
When he opened his own practice, Soleri began an incessant career as a theoretician concerned with issues in ecology, community life, social ethics and global overcrowding. Issues of extraordinary relevance, which Soleri addressed with enthusiasm as early as the 1950s, when he set up Cosanti, a school and building site in which students from Arizona University experiment with communal way of living, constructing an experimental ecological environment which they finance by selling their ceramics.
Soleri is associated with the concept of "arcology," a term he coined in the sixties to combine the concepts of "architecture" and "ecology." Soleri designed self-sufficient hyperstructures with a high population density which minimise environmental impact and optimise movement, “temporal and spatial relationships and energy issues.”
This enormous project was implemented in Arcosanti, a town of about 5,000 in Arizona which Soleri began building in 1970 with the aid of hundreds of volunteers: an "urban laboratory" which "contrasts with the big cities and their degraded suburbs" and has an essential role to play in the evolution of the "city of the future."