Peter Merholz writes about his trip to Arcosanti. This is a planned village/city/town designed by Paolo Soleri. We visited the place in 1978 on a Costello family trip through the Southwest and it seemed pretty cool to me at eleven. Some twenty plus years later I looked into revisiting it and...was disappointed. What was cool to me as a kid seemed to be totally impractical as an adult. The economics of the location alone make no sense, and to the adult in me the idea seems like idealistic architecture run amok.