Creator of the experimental Arizona eco-town Arcosanti
"If you are truly concerned about the problems of pollution, waste, energy depletion, land, water, air and biological conservation, poverty, segregation, intolerance, population containment, fear and disillusionment," reads the sign at the entrance to Arcosanti, "join us." Beyond the placard lies the proposed solution to this list of ills: an otherworldly landscape of concrete domes and soaring vaults rising out of the Arizona desert, like a cross between an ancient Mayan ruin complex and the Star Wars cities of Tatooine. This is the experimental eco-town of Arcosanti, the lifetime's work of the visionary Italian-born architect Paolo Soleri, who has died aged 93.
One of the last surviving disciples of Frank Lloyd Wright, Soleri dedicated his life to developing this self-sufficient off-grid community around a model of low-impact environmental design that he termed "arcology" – a fusion of architecture and ecology. Described by Newsweek magazine in 1976 as "the most important urban experiment undertaken in our time," it was a pioneering project that attracted students in their thousands over the years to come and live, work, build and take part in an all-consuming lifestyle experiment.
Conceived as a reaction against the pernicious sprawl of American suburbia, Arcosanti was planned as a dense, car-free development, in which curvaceous organic dwellings were linked by a network of winding footpaths. With passive environmental design at the core, the buildings were south-facing, their thick concrete apses oriented to soak up the winter sun, while providing shade during the sweltering summer. Entirely self-built, it was also a conscious critique of commercial house-building: "Developer," Soleri would say, "starts with 'D', like 'devil' and 'demon'."
Intended to house a final population of 5,000, the community reached a peak of around 200 in the 1970s – but today it is home to fewer than 60 diehard disciples. "The main fault is me," Soleri told the Guardian in 2008, three years before he retired from the project. "I don't have the gift of proselytising. For years and years, they responded to me like, 'That crazy guy, what is he doing out there?'"
Born in Turin, Soleri studied architecture at the city's polytechnic before moving to the US when he graduated in 1946 to work with Lloyd Wright at his countercultural colony of Taliesin West. It was a formative time, during which he absorbed the principles of Wright's own craft commune, but he broke with his master after a year and a half, disagreeing with Wright's promotion of low-rise suburbia, in such plans as Broadacre City.
"We must build up, not out," said Soleri. "The problem is the present design of cities are only a few storeys high, stretching outward in unwieldy sprawl for miles … turning farms into parking lots, and waste enormous amounts of time and energy transporting people, goods and services over their expanses."
He returned to Italy in 1950 and was commissioned to build a vast ceramics factory in Vietri on the Amalfi coast. Its undulating facade of tapering terracotta cones, studded with porthole windows, formed the basis of what would prove to be his trademark style. It was here, too, that he learned the techniques of ceramics and bronze casting, which became the central activities in Arcosanti's production of wind-bells – sold as the town's only source of income.
In 1956, Soleri settled with his wife Colly in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he established the Cosanti Foundation and built trial dwellings in a process of "earthcasting". Mounds of earth were built up, concrete poured over the top, and the earth dug away from beneath, creating a mysterious roughly-hewn aesthetic. In Arcosanti, which he began in 1970, this developed into tilt-up concrete construction, with panels cast in dug-out troughs in the ground and heaved up into place, giving the effect of the whole place being built of great slabs hewn from the earth.
Strongly influenced by the Jesuit palaeontologist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Soleri spoke in a hypnotic language of his own making, dotted with strange cosmic terms such as the "omega seed" and "miniaturisation-complexity-duration". He expounded his vision in a book, The City in the Image of Man (1969), a spellbinding work filled with intricate drawings of fantasy cities – from floating communes to canyon-like structures and teetering towers built on top of dams. It was a thrilling futuristic prophecy for droves of 1970s students, whom the guru Soleri entertained on a packed lecture circuit, but one that quickly became anachronistic in the consumerist 1980s.
With environmental Armageddon back on the agenda once again now, might there be a viable future for Arcosanti and Soleri's principles of arcology after all? "Materialism is, by definition, the antithesis of green," he told the Guardian. "We have this unstoppable, energetic, self-righteous drive that's innate in us, but which has been reoriented by limitless consumption. Per se, it doesn't have anything evil about it. It's a hindrance. But multiply that hindrance by billions, and you've got catastrophe."
Colly died in 1982. Soleri is survived by two daughters, Kristine and Daniela, and two grandchildren.
• Paolo Soleri, architect, born 21 June 1919; died 9 April 2013