Analogous cities
“With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”
Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities
Sometimes I feel that our physical experience of the city is less clear or less comprehensible than the image or idea of the city. The complexity of cities makes them difficult if not impossible to fully understand; so we prefer instead to only seek to understand their images. We favour a city built not from brick, stone and glass, but one constructed from memory, association and history.
Nicholas Roeg’s film Don’t Look Now
This type of collaged continuality is not uncommon in cinema. We have all seen films shot in cities that are well known to us, were the director is keen to emphasis the location of the action and has therefore staged a car chase that passes in no logical order every landmark building in the city. As we watch we realise that this is another London, Paris or New York. A perfect condensed city of images, a place in which everything is near. I love the opportunity these false cities gives us to separate the real and the analogous city. I sometimes feel that these comprehensible cities are better, more identifiable that actual places.
In Aldo Rossi’s seminal book The Architecture of the City
Now we have another Venice, within a hotel in Las Vegas; it is a city of paper thin facades set around a crystal clear canal. A strange ugly copy that makes little attempt to replicate real places or forms. Unlike the other Venice the sky is always blue and it is very clean. Although it is banal, vapid and clichéd, when I saw this Venice it surprised me how it caused me to recall in detail the charm and intricacy of the ‘real’ city by way of its inaccuracy.
This got me thinking about other cities, the cities that I have never visited. When I imagine these cities I see all the great buildings gathered together along one street or around a single square. I know that when I do visit it will not be like that, but for now this will have to do.
In the 1970s the station identity for Thames Television featured all the major buildings, the Palace of Westminster, St Paul’s, Tower Bridge, etc all grouped together in an impossible silhouette. I always loved the fact that this perfect London, a London that does not exist, should be the image of London. To those who knew, it was a fabrication and those who did not, it was perfection. Quoting again from Calvino we can see that a city can be what ever you can imagine it to be, but only that.
(http://625.uk.com/tv_logos/thames.htm)
“From now on, I’ll describe the cities to you,” the Khan had said, “in your journeys you will see if they exist.” But the cities visited by Marco Polo were always different from those thought of by the emperor. “And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced,” Kublai said. “It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations.”
I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all others,” Marco answered. “It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exists. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real.”
Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities 1972)
David Phillips 2005
This is a beautifully written piece. I’m not sure that we always prefer a city constructed from memory. What i like about my adopted city (Toronto) is that most of the memories get swept away with the grime off the streets, on a cyclical basis, or built over and upon.
/Anon 16/10/2005