Go West, Young Woman! And Then... Return! To Write Your Thesis by Gambrill Foster [HP]
For a second, we thought we might not even get to see Arizona. “We” is the six Historic Preservation students on a trip for our Concrete unit in Theo Prudon’s Material Conservation class. After an eventful flight -that included a woman passing out in the aisle mid-turbulencewe picked up the paperwork and keys for two rental cars and headed into the garage. Theo and our adjunct professor Jennifer Schork grabbed one and headed out. The six students piled into our other car and were right behind them...we thought. The parking garage attendant wouldn’t let us out because the person who rented the car (Theo) wasn’t driving it. It was not, we were told, an acceptable excuse that he was driving the other car. Finally, after a trip back upstairs and even more back and forth, we were let of of the garage and were on our way!
MULTIPLICITY -76- FIELDWORK
The trip was designed as 5 days in Arizona, visiting Taliesin West, Casa Grande Native American Ruins, Cosanti and Arcosanti. We had been studying concrete, the first unit of three in Special Topics in Material Conservation, the sites that we were to visit had unique uses of concrete construction. The bulk of our time was going to be at Arcosanti, where we would spend two days on site and practice doing field assessments on different areas of the compound. Arcosanti is a compound begun by Paolo Soleri in 1971, as an example of his solution to Urban Sprawl: Arcology. Arcology is a principle Soleri pioneered and worked on for most of his career, and life. The word itself is a mash-up between Architecture and Ecology, and the structures were composed to be able to feed and house large groups of people on less land than traditional cities.
Gambrill Foster field testing concrete with sounding mallet. Photo: Anisha Athrey.
When we first arrived, we had a tour by the Executive Director. He walked us all over the compound, from visitor center to communal kitchen to bronze forge, even his own apartment (which was once soleri’s drafting room!). Everyone knew him and in turn he knew all the faces and made us feel welcome immediately.
