The Timelessness Of The City

Pictures that show relationships in or features of the built environment that are indicative of pace layers*.

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In Laudomia, the city Links to an external site. is composed of three identically named sides: that of the living, the dead, and the unborn. As the living city Links to an external site. increases in population, so does the periphery of the tombs of the dead and the realm of the unborn, both of which serve the living as they “visit the dead and decipher their own names on their stone slabs” and “frequent the house of the unborn to interrogate them” on their own lives, not the ones yet to come. Such is the nature of the existence of cities Links to an external site. and architecture in general; there is a form of the present that precedes its arrival and likewise, a future state that will take its place. A city’s Links to an external site. identity is molded by both past and present, constantly creating multiple potential futures that simultaneously become possible pasts; the result is a sort of timelessness that a city can identify with.

The living Laudomia has to seek in the Laudomia of the dead the explanation of itself, even at the risk of finding more there or less: explanations for more than one Laudomia, for different cities that could have been and were not.

In another sense, Calvino ultimately argues that all cities stem from one. In the case of Marco Polo, that city Links to an external site. is his native Venice, but the overall idea is that all variations are multiple faces of the singular city Links to an external site. – a product of timeless constructs “made of desires or fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules absurd, their perspectives deceitful.” When Kublai begins to describe his own constructed city Links to an external site., Marco replies: “This is precisely the city Links to an external site. I was telling you about when you interrupted me,” thus alluding to the notion of interconnected identities that are shared by all cities Links to an external site. and stem from our collective knowledge.

Each city Links to an external site. takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name.