Obituary of John Pressly Solso

SOLSO, John Pressly Passed away December 6, 2017. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska on 18 June 1929, the year of the great stock market crash. Father: F I Solso, a businessman, Mother: Elizabeth Pressly, daughter of a prominent Presbyterian pastor. Out of high school, John helped in his dad's business for a few years, then entered the architecture school at the University of Nebraska, graduating with a B Arch degree in 1960. He worked as an architect in Princeton, Albuquerque, San Francisco, and London with mentors including Maxwell Fry FRIBA, Steve Baer and Jeff Cook AIA - all pioneers in passive architectural applications of solar energy. In the 1970's he took a ten-year break, living a pre-industrial life on a rock-scrabble acreage on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. Returning to the U.S., he specialized in the design of passive solar houses in Phoenix for 17 years before retiring to Tucson. He served as Chair of the Phoenix Chapter of Zero Population Growth and was a member of the Hemlock Society. In 2000, John joined an Earthwatch expedition which documented 19th Century Ottoman houses in Turkey. He met his wife, Sybil in an on-line forum devoted to co-housing issues in 1995. Together with neighbors, they helped build Milagro, a co-housing community in Tucson. Arrangements by ADAIR FUNERAL HOMES, Dodge Chapel.