Paolo Soleri

As I write this, it is a cold and rainy April in Chicago. Forty degrees, slanting drizzle, ugly wind, a winter that just won't seem to pass. Five Aprils ago, I was in Cordes Junction, Arizona, living and working at Arcosanti. It was much warmer there, dry and sun-whipped.

Arcosanti was founded by Turin-born architect and artist Paolo Soleri, who passed away on April 9th at the age of 93. I had the good fortune to meet him a few times while I was living there, though he spent most of his time in Phoenix by that point. When I lived at Arco, in 2007-08, Paolo was still president of the board of the Cosanti foundation, and drove up once a week to give lectures. 

Sketch I made of Paolo at one of his lectures, autumn, 2007.

Material Witness

Last week, I spent two days processing some old wood.  So it goes; de-nailing, tar-scraping, jointing, and re-sawing are all part and parcel of using old lumber, be it architectural salvage or alley finds.  I've worked with a lot of old-growth wood, which is embedded with history.  The trees themselves began life maybe fifty years before they were cut down, and then were used to construct buildings that stood a hundred years more.  By the time I come into contact with that wood, touch it, cut it, plane it, taste its dust hanging in the afternoon air, I am knifing through almost geologic layers of time.  Those trees were teenagers in some Michigan forest as Abraham Lincoln dropped the Gettysburg Address on freshly bloodied ground in Pennsylvania.


This time, the wood I was milling was different -- it was redwood.  That name sparks up a whole chain of associations, images of clear-cut hillsides, logging protests, and dim, fog-spooked forests.  Now endangered, redwood is rarely logged.  They are difficult to grow from seed, take an enormous amount of time to mature, and need a perfect storm of ecological conditions to prosper.  Once going, however, the giants are unstoppable, growing to unimaginable proportions and capable of living hundreds of years.  


After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, fire-suppression technology became very important.  A fast-growing, mostly wood-framed city, Chicago was devastated by a lack of fire-fighting infrastructure.  New building codes mandated the installation of water tanks on roofs, allowing for a large, gravity-pressurized water supply for each building.  Tanks were built from then-abundant West Coast redwood and Gulf Coast cypress, two highly rot-resistant, spongy woods that made tight, leakproof tanks once the wood fibers swelled with water.  Redwood and cypress are also not good for much else, as their grain makes them unsuitable for structural applications.

Drawing for a railroad water tank in Chicago, circa 1937, similar in design and construction to the rooftop towers.  Courtesy of Cyberspace World Railroad.