The idea began with the band Hundred Waters, but given, in part, the general vibes and communitarian spirit, they don’t really take credit for it. “I believe that the stars align in a lot of things like this,” says Zach Tetreault, the band’s drummer, and a cofounder of FORM Arcosanti, which, with its location and tiny, by-application-only audience—and, until recently, a zero-dollar admission fee—can sometimes sound, well, utopian. “It’s like if the right people come together and have a similar ethos and vision, and anything is possible,” he says.

Down a long, dusty, desert road an hour north of Phoenix sits the site: the experimental town of Arcosanti. The arcological utopia (that’s a portmanteau of archaeology and ecology) was the dream of visionary architect Paolo Soleri, who yearned for a holistic environment with minimal impact on the planet. Soleri was an Italian-American student of Frank Lloyd Wright and was inspired by Wright’s creative incorporation of nature into his designs. Soleri took it one step further, though, via a process of earth casting—creating increasingly complex molds out of desert silt, pouring slip clay or concrete over them, and casting bell shapes large enough to form apses and eventually livable structures.