Futurist Paolo Soleri from the Arizona Desert

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The following is the obituary of Paolo Soleri, a brilliant human being and futurist who lived and worked in Paradise Valley, Arizona.  He died four years ago but his life and achievements will live forever.  When I went to school at the University of Arizona in Tuscon, several fraternity brothers were into architecture and encouraged me to travel to the Phoenix area to see this unusual Italian architect.

His studio and teaching areas were a series of pods spread across the desert and his designs for a future civilization were stunning.  I can remember the passion this man had for preparing for the future of mankind and his determination to establish a model in the Arizona High Desert.

A few years later my parents moved to Paradise Valley and every time I went to visit I went to the Paolo Soleri studio and was amazed at the many, many architectural students from around the world who journeyed to work with his on his amazing concepts.

To help raise money for his unique institute he also made the most complex and magical bells I ever saw and collecting the Soleri bells became a passion.  Mostly just watching the master at work was sheer fun as his relationship with students, his extraordinary designs, and his adaption to his adopted desert were a source of delight and inspiration.

Everyone should get a chance to experience the Soleri studio and his model of the cities of the future out in the desert, it will give you hope for mankind.  Soleri was one of a kind, and he influenced thousands with his genius.  Meeting him several times was one of the highlights of my life.

Arcosanti

IN MEMORIAM

REMEMBERING PAOLO SOLERI

June 21,1919 - April 9, 2013

Today the world has lost one of its great minds.  Paolo Soleri, architect, builder, artist, writer, theorist, husband, father, born on Summer Solstice, has died at age 93.  

Paolo Soleri spent a lifetime investigating how architecture, specifically the architecture of the city, could support the countless possibilities of human aspiration. The urban project he founded, Arcosanti, 65 miles north of Phoenix, was described by NEWSWEEK magazine as “…the most important urban experiment undertaken in our lifetimes.”

His own lifetime of work is represented in models, drawings, books, lectures and museum exhibits throughout the world. Soleri’s exhibition in 1970 at the Corcoran Museum in Washington DC – and the concurrent publication of his landmark book, CITY IN THE IMAGE OF MAN – changed forever the global conversation about urban planning on our living planet. His term, “Arcology” joining the words architecture and ecology to represent one whole system of understanding human life on the earth is meant to serve as the basis for that conversation.

Paolo Soleri’s ideas are embodied on the ground in the flowing forms of his architectural workshop Cosanti in Paradise Valley, (now an Arizona Historic Landmark) and in the continuing construction at Arcosanti, the urban laboratory on the high desert in central Arizona. There, to date over 7,000 students have participated in its construction. More than 50,000 architecture enthusiasts visit the site each year.

Over the years Soleri’s architectural commissions have included the Dome House in Cave Creek, Arizona, the astonishing Artistica Ceramica Solimene ceramics factory in Vietri, Italy,  the Indian Arts Cultural Center/ Theatre in Santa Fe, the Glendale Community College Theater, the University of Arizona College of Medicine chapel, the Scottsdale Pedestrian Bridge and Plaza; and his latest bas-relief murals part of the new I-17 Arcosanti/Cordes Junction Arizona traffic interchange. In an age of specialization Paolo Soleri showed architecture’s ability to influence and even lead the search for a new pattern of inhabiting the earth. The awards that resulted from this search included gold medals from the American Institute of Architects, the Union of International Architects, the Venice Biennale and the National Design Award from the Cooper-Hewitt/Smithsonian Museum.

Soleri continued questioning and creating until his death. The theme of his last project, a series of collages entitled “Then and Now”, juxtaposed his own signature forms with illustrations of life from antiquity. In this project Paolo Soleri attempted to capture the critical notion that we are constantly building on the past, on the work of countless generations that have preceded us on the earth. Our own work - and Soleri’s work especially - put into this context, might be a seed that takes many more generations to mature and complete.

Paolo Soleri is survived by two daughters, Kristine Soleri Timm and Daniela Soleri, both of California, two grandchildren, and the famous urban research Foundation he began, Cosanti. A private burial took place at Arcosanti, the internationally – renowned urban laboratory he founded in 1970, whose construction continues. Soleri’s body was placed beside his wife Colly, who preceded him in death by 31 years.
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CPT Twits from the Book of Jobs

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Steve Jobs that is.  Founder of Apple.  America's last revolutionary.  
February 24, 1955 - October 5, 2011.

His most famous quotes from the Book of Jobs...

1) “We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.”

2) “That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.”

3) “Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other opinions drown your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

4) “I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.”

5) “Quality is much better than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”

6) “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

7) “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”

8)When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

9) “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”

10) “My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.”

11) “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

12) “What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”

13) “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… The ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

14) “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.”

15) “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

16) “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

17) “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

18) “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

19) “If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.”

20) “Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

Former Apple VP of Worldwide Marketing Communication Allison Johnson said the two words Steve Jobs hated most, the most “dreaded, hated” words at Apple under Steve Jobs were “branding” and “marketing.”

“In Steve’s mind,” she recalls, “people associated brands with television advertising and commercials and artificial things. The most important thing was people’s relationship to the product. So any time we said ‘brand’ it was a dirty word.”

On the subject of marketing, Johnson says that “marketing is when you have to sell to somebody. If you aren’t providing value, if you’re not educating them about the product, if you’re not helping them get the most out of the product, you’re selling. And you shouldn’t be in that mode.”

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