THE (IN)VISIBLE CITIES
The (in)visible cities
This teaching project is a bridge, connecting Torino and Nanjing, two ancient capitals, two noble cities, two schools of architecture, two scholars’ worlds.
Like in a mirror.
With the Chinese Students at Southeast University Nanjing we designed the disappeared “Galleria” in Torino Piazza Castello (who linked Palazzo Reale and Palazzo Madama, along the Roman city walls).
With the Italian and International Students at Politecnico di Torino we are designing the ruined courtyard-houses settlement of Nanjing HehuaTang (along the southern city walls).
Of course: the image in a mirror is a virtual image.
Torino and Nanjing are visible, and invisible at the same time, cities.
Invisible, like the cities in a famous book by Italo Calvino (1972):
“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspective deceitful, and everything conceals something else”
In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo, Mongol Emperor and Venetian traveller. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the Empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspool his tales, the Emperor detects these fantastic places are no more than they appear.
Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
"But which is the stone that supports the bridge?" Kublai Khan asks.
"The bridge is not supported by one stone or another," Marco answers, "but by the line of the arch that they form."
Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. The he adds: "Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me."
Polo answers: "Without stones there is no arch."
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