Contributors to this Issue

measures, now becomes the space of the inhabitants and becomes a meeting place. The focus shifts on human associations and relationships, while the rational and objective intervention gives way to a new approach. It takes instincts and uncontrollable desires and the irrational individual’s desires under consideration. Image 6 Mesa City, Paolo Soleri, (1958) 6a View of Mesa City Market 6b View oF Mesa City 6c Higher Learning Complex In apparent contrast to this premise, the future of the settlements are prefigured with an extremely unusual and shocking character. The city becomes a technological entity, in constant movement. In an atmosphere of great cultural ferment dominated by slogans and Pop Art, architecture transcends reality and leaves reality to dreams. In the panels produced by the British collective Archigram, the city becomes a Walking City( Image 8): a place of technology and consumerism, a reality dominated by light and electricity where the image is an entity in continuous evolution. The buildings designed by British architect Ron Herron, of Archigram, were 40 levels high and they were able to walk through the countryside on telescopic legs like giant insects. Various walking cities could interconnect with each other to form larger ‘walking metropolises’ when needed, and then disperse when their concentrated power would be no longer necessary. Individual buildings or structures could also be mobile, moving wherever their owner wanted or needed to be dictated. Image 7 Cloud Nine, Buckminster Fuller, (1958/1960) Image 8 A walking city, Archigram, (1964) 8a/8b: Proposal for a nomadic city Similar to the flying city of Fuller, there were air gardens that another visionary, Thomas Shannon, suggested in the ‘70s. The transparent dome, one kilometer high, would cover an area of three kilometres in diameter. The lush gardens, an ideal residence for artists, would have floated like clouds about a mile from the ground, giving shadow. Visionary structures grow and expand themselves to accommodate more and new plugins: capsules, clusters of homes and giant animal-shaped objects that occupy the free spaces. The result is a city in direct relation to the citizens needs and, like them, always changing. The “radical” approach inspires other architectural works, such as Nakagin Capsule Tower (image 9) and the Plan for the Tokyo Bay (image 10), were developed by the Japanese movement called Metabolism. Image 9 Nakagin Capsule Tower, Kishō Kurokawa, (1970-1972) 9a project 9b actually: completed in 1972, the building is a rare remaining example of Japanese Metabolism, an architectural movement emblematic of Japan's postwar cultural resurgence. It was the world's first example of capsule architecture built for permanent and practical use. The building still exists but has fallen into disrepair. Image 10 Plan for the Tokyo Bay, Kenzo Tange, (1960): Kenzo Tange's 1960 plan for Tokyo was proposed at a time when many cities in the industrial world were experiencing the height of urban sprawl. With a unique insight into the emerging characteristics of the contemporary city and an optimistic faith in the power of design, Tange attempted to impose a new physical order on Tokyo. His vision for establishing a new spatial order for the continuously expanding and transforming metropolis was ultimately a Utopian ideal. In these blueprints, the city becomes a mega-diffuse structure and buildings are transformed into “hives” amassed around vertical connective nuclei. The mega-structure is presented as the radical manifesto of architecture: in the space of vision and surreal, the architect opera spreads endlessly and it expands relentlessly. The images created by Italian groups such as Superstudio and Archizoom depict the city as an infinite body, where gigantic abstract volumes embrace and incorporate nature and existing buildings. In their manifesto-project as Continuous Monument (image 11) and No stop city( image 12), the creative work becomes a totality. Detached from the context and reality, dreamlike visions take over and convert the reality around us in something totally new and visionary. The utopia and dreams become a depiction of generation soul; their emotions and their momentum flow into utopian and innovative projects which are presented to shock and stimulate the contemporary man. A visionary and innovative approach of this kind can be a means to give new life to the architectural design. A point of view guided by dreams and the designer’s emotions, can become a means to engage people in a new way of living, elevating architectures from simple spaces to Image 11 Continuous Monument, Superstudio, (1967): The architects from Superstudio movement were trying to understand the order on the earth with the help of architecture. There is a "moderate utopia" to imagine a near future in which all architecture will be created with a single act, from a single design capable of clarifying once and for all the motives which have induced man to build dolmens, menhirs, pyramids and lastly to trace a white line in desert. Image 12 No stop city, Archizoom, (1970-1971): 12a/12b No-stop City is an unbuilt project. The drawings show an infinitely extending grid, subdivided by partial lines symbolizing walls and interrupted only by natural features, such as mountains. The photographs portray an endless and rather featureless space in which humans live as campers. Spaces are filled with rocks and branches, small pieces of nature brought inside the artificial world. areas of emotion and suggestion. Expressing dreams can be very difficult; dream’s world has a special language that is very different from the logic that guides the actions during the day. It is an intuitive, emotional, synthetic speech, comparable only to art. Maybe, Italo Calvino with his Invisible cities (image 13) was the best, able to mix together dreams and reality, architecture and visions. He is not talking about cities at all, not in the way we normally think of the word. Each city is imagined, each city is conceptual. Calvino’s cities are constructed of ideas. Each city represents a thought experiment, it’s an ordering and reordering of the emotional and philosophical reverberations of our civilised world, our human condition. They don’t exist on any map. Image 13 Invisible cities, Italo Calvino (1972): 13A ARGIA: “What makes Argia different from other cities is that it has earth instead of air. The streets are completely filled with dirt, clay packs the rooms to the ceiling, on every stair another stairway is set in negative, over the roofs of the houses hang layers of rocky terrain like skies with clouds. We do not know if the inhabitants can move about in the city, widening the worm tunnels and the crevices where roots twist: the dampness destroys people's bodies and they have scant strength; everyone is better off remaining still, prone; anyway, it is dark. From up here, nothing of Argia can be seen; some say, 'It's down below there,' and we can only believe them. The place is deserted. At night, putting your ear to the ground, you can sometimes hear a door slam”. 13B CLOE: “In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping. A girl comes along, twirling a parasol on her shoulder, and twirling slightly also her rounded hips. A woman in black comes along, showing her full age, her eyes restless beneath her veil, her lips trembling. At tattooed giant comes along; a young man with white hair; a female dwarf; two girls, twins, dressed in coral. Something runs among them, an exchange of glances link lines that connect one figure with another and draws arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene: a blind man with a cheetah on a leash, a courtesan with an ostrich-plume fan, an ephebe, a Fat Woman. And thus, when some people happen to find themselves together, taking shelter from the rain under an arcade, or crowding beneath an awning of the bazaar, or stopping to listen to the band in the square, meetings, seductions, copulations, orgies are consummated among them without a word exchanged, without a finger touching anything, almost without an eye raised. A voluptuous vibration constantly stirs Chloe, the most chaste of cities. If men and women began to live their ephemeral dreams, every phantom would become a person with whom to begin a story of pursuits, pretenses, misunderstandings, clashes, oppressions, and the carousel of fantasies would stop.” In Calvino’s book, a young Marco Polo is describing the cities from his expedition to Kublai Khan. Marco Polo describes a total of fifty-five cities, that are divided into eleven thematic groups of five each: Cities and Memory, Cities and Desire, Cities and Signs, Thin Cities, Trading Cities, Cities and Eyes, Cities and Names, Cities and Dead, Cities and the Sky, Continuous Cities and Hidden Cities. He tries to portray an image in every sentence of the book; there is a smooth flow of words in the sentences. The interludes between Khan and Polo form a framing device, a story within a story, a reality into a dream that plays with the natural complexity of stories. They do not speak the same language, but when Polo explains the various cities, he uses objects from the city to tell the story and each character understands the other through their own interpretation of what they are saying. Cities are described from the eyes of a visitor, the way he felt on getting the first glimpse of the city. Everybody has a different perception, a different view of looking at things and there is a little border between dream and reality. The cities which Marco Polo recounts are intended as