ABSTRACT
Paolo Soleri (1919–2013) is best known for his visionary project, Arcosanti, in the American desert south-west. Arcosanti remains an ongoing materialization of his ideas about building – blending community, ecology, futurism, architecture, spirituality, creativity and philosophy. It is here that in 1972, Soleri began designing a Teilhard de Chardin Cloister as an addition to this community.
Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s (1881–1955) spiritual meditations on humankind residing on the thin crust of the earth and of nature’s beauty and fragility resonated for Soleri in a decade marked by an awakening to ecology and the damage humankind had done to the earth’s fragile balance. Soleri, inspired by Teilhard, sought to demonstrate that architecture is religious, not because it is built or used by an established church, but because it teaches its inhabitants ways to contemplate spirit and earth. Rather than speak directly of Christ or of the Catholic doctrine, Soleri absorbed Teilhard’s spiritual writings on the meditation on the beauty of the natural world, of the matter of Mater, of Mother Earth and designed a cloister that challenged traditional spatial configurations in used in Catholic spaces of worship.
