Reading the Cityitalo Calvino’s InvIsIble CItIes and the aRChiteCtuRe of CultuRal imagination

Annelise PittsAdvisor: Peter Waldman

ReseaRCh statement

“The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightening rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”

Italo Calvino, Cities and Memory 3, Invisible Cities

Early in his Ten Books on Architecture, Vitruvius describes the dual origins of architecture and language. These cultural systems, he writes, arose from a communicative void created when humans, who had previously lived “like wild animals” alone in the forest, assembled around the original spatial void (a lightening-struck fire that had created the first clearing in the primordial forest). Through this myth, the earliest architectural treatise aligns architecture and language as signifying systems that developed in response to material conditions. These signifying capabilities, it would seem, arise from an original condition of spatial difference – the opposition of forest and clearing—that, in turn, engendered oppositions of: margin and center, field and figure, chaos and order, nature and civilization, and space and time.

Two millennia later, architects and mythologists continue to make sense of and through media that are simultaneously spatial and temporal. Efforts made in the last fifty years to resolve questions of architectural signification through studies of linguistics and architecture have largely fallen short due to a tendency to privilege system [langue] over history. This sort of thinking fails to recognize that architectural interpretation—be it through building or inhabitation—continuously reconstitutes the Architecture System, and that the unstable interplay between these two might be a more productive locus of investigation.

For this reason, I am drawn to Italo Calvino’s mythological descriptions of cities that refuse to concretize oppositions of space and time, instead inviting their visitors to occupy a place between them as their attentions are drawn to cities defined by the physical traces of continuously developing relation-ships between narrative and constructed form; quests in which desire is transmuted into memory at the moment of its spatial realization; and networks of human interaction that are more permanent than the buildings that facilitate them. These fantastical cities are simultaneously depictions of material realities and of the structure of the imagination. Reading, therefore, is posited as the productive interaction between an ordered imagination and a physi-cal object of investigation.

Taking Vitruvius’s observation about the structural similarities between architecture and language, Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and as points of departure, my project utilizes architectural and linguistic theory, literature, maps and architectural case studies to position reading as the locus of the continual dialectical evolution of City and Cultural Imagination. In so doing, I will ask: How does architecture signify? What is the relationship between constructed form and the order of the imagination? Can architecture and literature be studied in tandem to generate strategies for constructing an architecture that embraces the unstable relationship between form, order, and meaning?

The site of my future investigations will be Rome’s Campus Martius, the site of Calvino’s long time home as well as that of Piranesi’s imagined archae-ologies of Rome. I plan to construct my site through readings of drawings, maps, historic documents, and Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The program will be a cenotaph dedicated to Italo Calvino that invites visitors to honor Calvino and his work by acting as a site of urban speculation.

ReseaRCh and methodologyMy interest in the relationship between imagination, or ideology, and material culture stems from the work that I did in art history as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. While there, I developed a thesis project that examined a narrative group of 14th century tapestries depicting St. John’s Apocalypse. By analyzing the tapestries simultaneously through studies of the material culture surrounding tapestry production and the cultural history of the apocalpse narrative, I was able to show that the tapestries that I was studying were part of a larger history in which cultural imagination and material culture engaged in a dialectical relation-ship, constantly challenging and re-shaping one another. In order to understand the tapestries’ significance, it was therefore essential to generate a notion of context that included both material culture and ideology.

During my time at the University of Virginia, I began to wonder how my revelation about a method of reading art might relate to my own architectural endeavors. Stanley Fish’s work on reader resonse criticism, Peter Eisenman and Robert Somol’s work on diagramming, Carol Burns’ work on site, and David Leatherbarrow’s writing about the act of drawing have all influenced a method-ology that attempts to transition seamlessly between reading sites as contexts and making new marks or incisions in those sites. I have developed my design research project as a means of furthering these interests while attempting to synthesize my work in art hstory and architecture.

I began my research by looking at several iconic historic sites, questioning the relationship between those sites’ histories of architec-tural development and their geographic, ritual and intellectual contexts. In both the Athenian Acropolis and the temple complex in Ancient Olympia, I found tensions between expressions of timeless, or synchronic understandings of the world, and the presence of historic narrative (see case studies, Appendix I).

In the second part of the semester, I moved from a study of architectural narratives to one of narratives about architecture. I dia-grammed each of the cities in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities through mixed media collages. This project posed the challenge of trans-lating narrative, which operates diachronically, into a visual medium, which operates synchronically. It was therefore especially diffi-cult to translate the paradoxes embedded within Calvino’s narratives into a visual medium. By using Claude Levi-Strauss’s method of mapping myth to map the entire book, however, I found that each of Calvino’s cities in Invisible Cities is embedded within a larger structure of paradox and reversal. This structure only becomes apparent to the reader who condenses the narratives into a synchronic representation of the work. This, in some ways, is what I admire most about Calvino; while deeply interested in the history of ideas and in the physical manifes-tations of culture in the built form of cities, he is willing to overlay, collage, and condense these histories in order to obtain a richer reading of the present. After reading and translating Calvino, I began to re-read the city of Rome through Calvino’s descriptions of cities, the diagrams that I had made of these cities, and the understandings of these places that I developed in my prior case studies. The map below was a first attempt at illustrating a Calvino-esque Rome.

spRing pRoposalNext semester, I plan to continue my investigation by designing a cenotaph to Italo Calvino in Rome. The project will be centered in the Portico d’Ottavia at the base of the Capitolene Hill, but will extend into the city through a series of paths and small scale in-terventions that facilitate new ways of reading the city. The cenotaph will comprise a series of rooms inspired by Calvino’s Invisible Cities that simultaneously look inward towards particular artifacts and outward to the city beyond. I also plan to design an exhibi-tion book containing maps, drawings, and research on Rome that will be used to reframe the city for the purpose of this project. My tentative spring schedule is as follows:

Winter BreakComplete synthesis of fall semester’s work, including finalization of boards for sites in RomeVisit Rome?Week 1-3First marks and work on immediate site -- site strategies, sequence, extensions into cityWeek 4-5Pilgrimage Routes and mapping of narrative paths through city; finalize mapping portion of bookWeeks 6-8Plans, sections, models of immediate site of cenotaphWeeks 9Outposts and Routes through cityWeeks 10-15Finalize project, presentation