Arcosanti
Arcosanti is a real construction site north of Phoenix Arizona. It is the product of Paolo Soleri's architectural and societal theory of Arcology. In his philosophy, architecture is society and visa versa.
This is an image from Arcosanti's web page. It is a rendering of the mega-structure where it will be when completed. You can see the existing buildings near the bottom. notice the flowers in the foreground. They are meeting the rising sun in the east. The entire construction site is oriented to face south. In the summer months, the sun's path is high in the sky and the apse's(the mega-structure) curved shape keeps the inside in shade. In the winter months when the sun's path is low in the sky, the apse collects the sun's rays and stores the heat in it's enormous thermal mass. It regulates it's temperature with passive solar design principles and is incredibly aesthetic at the same time.
Here you can see a cross section of the apse; it's a dense urban setting. It literally takes our current cities' growth pattern and pushes them together and upward. How these cities will be built is still yet to be exhibited. Paolo himself says that Arcosanti is simply a laboratory for such building practices. I asked him a question in 2005 about market connectivity. He replied in alarm that it cannot connect to the open market in fear that it will become "like Disneyland".
I don't completely disagree with him. He is a sage, and climbing to his Arcosanti a spiritual journey for me. But I do believe it needs to connect to the rest of us and with the free market in more ways than it is doing right now. We need to innovate business models to allow for people to learn the basic principles of Arcosanti like passive solar design and cohabitation on a small scale, before we can ever hope for people to come together and build mega-structures like Arcosanti.
**Some Alumni of the workshops at Arcosanti are building a website for Alumni action!
