Evolution of Third-Millennium B.C. Cities and Visionary Breakthroughs in Today's Urban Centers Explored at Third Paradox Conference on Design Innovations in Sustainable Habitats.

News Editors/Architecture, Environment & Education Writers

PHOENIX--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 12, 2001

Lessons from Egypt's Lost City of the Pyramids Will Be Revealed

in the Context of the Future of Communal Habitation 

An Egyptologist at Harvard University's Semitic Museum, Dr. Mark Lehner, and an urban visionary who revitalizes cities worldwide, Jon A. Jerde, FAIA, will explore and compare urban development breakthroughs over six centuries at the September 21-23 Paradox conference at Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti habitat 65 miles north of Phoenix.

Lehner will reveal what he has learned from a recent archaeological excavation of a 4,600-year-old planned urban center in Egypt and Jerde will present innovative new solutions which today are transforming cities from Warsaw to Osaka.

The third Paradox conference, which will address sustainable habitats, cyberspace and new forms of community, will be attended by 300 new- and old-economy business executives, architects and urban planners, cybernauts and students.

Lehner is a research associate at University of Chicago's Oriental Institute and director of the Giza Plateau Mapping Project. In his presentation, "Through the Looking Glass to Ancient Egypt: Urban Planning and Self Organization in the Negative Third Millennium (B.C.)", he will discuss the Lost City of the Pyramids that his team discovered in 1999 and will continue to work until the end of 2001 in the Millennium Project, a marathon archaeological excavation in Egypt.

Lehner To Discuss Ideas Learned From 4,600-Year-Old City

"At the foot of the Giza Pyramids 300 meters south of the Great Sphinx we have recovered the footprint of a planned urban center that was unknown as recently as 18 months ago," Lehner explains. "This 4,600-year-old city is one of the oldest planned urban centers in the world. It includes Egypt's oldest known hypostyle hall, city blocks and paved streets over an area the size of four football fields. This was a place of production for copper, bread, meat and other industries that supported the construction of architecture that remained the largest in the world, the great Giza Pyramids, until the turn of the 20th century A.D."

Lehner will show the impact that building the giant pyramids had on the environment of the Nile Valley. "I will contrast this centrally-designed, orthogonally-planned urban center and the geometric precision of the Great Pyramid cemeteries that it supported with the self-organized villages from which it sprang. And I will compare this urban evolution of the Third Millennium B.C. to the move from high modernism to post modern curves, communities and ecology in the urban development of the Third Millennium A.D."

Jerde To Forecast the Future of Communal Habitation

Bringing the exploration of cities to the present will be Los Angeles-based urban visionary Jon Jerde, whose thinking on and practice of experiential placemaking have revitalized cities worldwide, including San Diego and Las Vegas; Fukuoka, Japan; and Rotterdam, The Netherlands. His mission has been "to fabricate rich, experiential places that inspire and engage the human spirit, designing the appropriate vessels for a renaissance of the human communal scene. Our projects become communal settings that renew a public life of richness and complexity," Jerde says. "A synchronous relationship between humans and the earth, both natural, living entities, is finally realizable. The challenge of the new millennium is to put things back together that once were whole," he states.

His presentation, "The Future of Communal Habitation," will look at "the change in cities as we know them and how they will exist in the future given the virtual-visual shift, the new energy-ecology information, and the density issue. The vision that I have in mind will truly excite, inspire...or scare," predicts Jerde.

Soleri To Host Ongoing Conference Inquiry into New Forms of Community

Paolo Soleri, 82-year-old Italian-born architect, associate of Frank Lloyd Wright, and pioneer of more livable, environmentally-intelligent cities, is hosting this third in a series of bi-annual summits at Arcosanti, a self-contained community in the Arizona desert that embodies Soleri's theory of eco-city design. This theory he calls "arcology" or the marriage of architecture and ecology to create urban habitats that conserve resources and blend harmoniously with the environment.

Paradox III continues the ongoing inquiry into the paradoxes in the increasing interplay between physical and cyber reality. This year's conference extends the Paradox II theme of "Cyberspace and Habitat: A Necessary Balance," into "Third-Millennium Habitats" that integrate the three worlds of community, virtuality, and nature. Other presenters are Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry; William Browning, director of Rocky Mountain Institute Green Development Services; Joe Firmage, founder of ISSO and US Web; and Paul Ray, author of The Cultural Creatives.

The conference fee of $195 increases to $295 after August 15. For complete information, call 415/865-0481 or 520/632-7135 or see www.arcosanti.org/paradox. Conference co-directors are Ron Anastasia ([e-mail]) and Michael Gosney ([e-mail]).