MISSION SAN XAVIER DEL BAC was founded in 1692 by a Jesuit missionary, Father Eusebio Francisco Kino. It was then that he became the first non-Indian to visit the village of Wa:k, or “Bac,” as he wrote it.
Parkinsonia
Photos and digital image by Fung Lin Hall
Yellow flower tree (Parkinsonia florida Arizona, State tree) and blue trash can among many black trash cans. digital image by Fung-Lin Hall April 27 2014
Today the world has lost one of its great minds. Paolo Soleri, architect, builder, artist, writer, theorist, husband, father, born on Summer Solstice, June 21, 1919, has died at age 93.
Soleri spent a lifetime investigating how architecture, specifically the architecture of the city, could support the countless possibilities of human aspiration. The urban project he founded, Arcosanti , 65 miles north of Phoenix, was described by NEWSWEEK magazine as “…the most important urban experiment undertaken in our lifetimes.”
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Paolo Soleri used to host Italian night, where he cooked for a few hundred people at Arcosanti. We will miss him and his dinners greatly. We all bought his bells and enjoyed taking visitors to Cosanti or Arcosanti.
“My position is not reductionist; my position is minimalist. Nothing is or becomes outside the big bang. Each organism is the big bang in action.” Paolo Soleri
“In nature, as an organism evolves it increases in complexity and it also becomes a more compact or miniaturized system. Similarly a city should function as a living system. Arcology, architecture and ecology as one integral process, is capable of demonstrating positive response to the many problems of urban civilization, population, pollution, energy and natural resource depletion, food scarcity and quality of life. Arcology recognizes the necessity of the radical reorganization of the sprawling urban landscape into dense, integrated, three-dimensional cities in order to support the complex activities that sustain human culture. The city is the necessary instrument for the evolution of humankind.” —Paolo Soleri
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Photo by Fung Lin Hall
(Fung Lin Hall’s Snake sculpture made from glued chopsticks – 1974 Honolulu Hawaii – an angel leaning against the ceramic sculptures made in 1980 Miami by Fung Lin Hall )
‘She accomplished more in 24 years than a lot of people do in a lifetime and she lived fully,’ Mr Holycross said.(read more )
She was just 80 miles short of becoming the youngest person in history to hike the Grand Canyon from end to end when tragedy struck, a loose rock some believe, tumbling her 300 feet below.
She trekked over 850 miles through the canyon’s trails while also ran in marathons, was literate in four languages and recently earned two degrees in biology and mathematics (see more photos here)
The young bride at 24 years old.
Immigrating to America with her mother and sister from Romania in 2002, she immediately fell in love with the canyons and hiked them as often as she could
Mr Holycross has since set up a scholarship in her name at Arizona State University titled the Ioana Elise Hociota Memorial Mathematics Scholarship Endowment which it is still receiving donations for.
It hopes to assist those by both need and merit base while also available to ‘immigrants who came to America with Ioana-sized dreams,’ it states.