A city you’ve never been

Imagine a place: a city you’ve never been. It is home to a shady, anonymous airport, flights taking off to who knows where; an arched library filled with towering spires of books; a restaurant in the desert, with a table set for a future banquet; and shimmering courtyards looking out over the sea, palm fronds shivering in the wind. This locale is an enigma: it summons your wildest dreams, your deepest fears. It’s wide and open, but layered with silent, intricate mysteries. As blinding bright as a night-time sun, as dark as a jet black swan, it’s a place you almost know, might get to know, or...

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city’s seven or seventy wonde

it gives to a question of yours.”

Words allow us to create images, to construct an environment that never really existed. We can “see” in our mind’s eye, a city we know nothing about, whether it’s a bustling square full of blank faces or a cold, anonymous place that seems almost uninhabited. Those syllables imagine places that are not real – perhaps they will be in the future, perhaps they never could be. Words can corral our other senses into submission, conjuring up towering skyscrapers made of thin air, winding streets consisting of empty atoms, parks and meadows filled with nothing more than the flimsy fancy of

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“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else,” Italo Calvino writes, in his 1972 novel, Invisible Cities. In this book, the Italian author imagines a historical conversation between Marco Polo and the aged emperor Kublai Khan, where the seasoned explorer describes 55 fictional cities across the world, portraying their inhabitants, the secrets and tales the places offer those who vis

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“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.” Calvin

Polo’s descriptions of these cities set a stage, where his characters dart and flicker with the memory of vitality, only to be replaced with another place’s personality a moment later. They remain hypothetical, floating fictions: suggestions of humanity’s chaotic variety. But try as he may, though, Marco Polo can’t fight the pull of his home, Venice: “Every time I describe a city, I am saying something about Venice,” he tells his interlocutor. In these circumstances, we have to ask: which is the real city, and which the my

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In the 18th century, ÉtienneLouis Boullée designed many neoclassical buildings inspired by the majesty of geometrical forms. Sublime and deeply impressive in size, his buildings make the viewer feel microscopic, aiming for perfection in form through geometry. Compared to nature’s majesty, we are as insignificant as an ant, looking at the mindboggling universe. Infinity, conjured out of classical, sculptural forms. Take his round-topped cenotaph for Isaac Newton, that included a spherical interior space, a homage to the scientist’s interest in celestial bodies. Covered with cypress trees, its...

“For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing

Though this building was never built, its impact was unmistakable in architectural circles at the time. Spreading through engravings and drawings (without photographs, how else could a 18th-century building spread?), Boullée showed that architecture can be just as influential when it is “only” about an idea. A place that doesn’t exist can tell us more than we might think. It can tell us about our desires, fears, hopes and dreams. What happens if we miss a step in the staircase? And what happens when up appears to be down, when north comes out looking like south? “Are you really sure that a floor...

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