Locating Invisible Cities
Week 9
Stills from “Powers of Ten,”1977
written and directed by Charles and Ray Eames
Chapter 9
Anonymous image
And Polo answers, “Traveling, you realize that differences are lost:
Each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form,
order, distances , a shapeless dust could invades the continents.
Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of
qualities which are like letters in a name.” (137)
Procopia, Invisible Cities
Tango, 1982, Zbigniew Rybczynski
“Even the sky has disappeared. I might as well leave the window. There are twenty-six of us
lodged in my room: to shift my feet I have to disturb those crouching on the floor...” (147)
“Cecilia,” Invisible Cities
Photo: Alex Maclean.
“The places have mingled,” the goatheard said. “Cecilia is everwhere.
Here, once upon a time, there must have been the Meadow of the
Low Sage.” (153)
Penthesilea, Invisible Cities
Photo: Alex Maclean.
“The question that now begins to gnaw at your mind is more
anguished: outside Penthesilea does an outside exist?” (158)
Marozia, Invisible Cities
Berlin Free-Zone 3-2”, Lebbeus Woods, 1990, Proposal for an abandoned government
building in reunified Berlin.
“Marozia consists of two cities, the rat’s and the swallow’s; both change with time, but
their relationship does not change; the second is the one about to free itself from the first.”
Berenice, Invisible Cities
“Metropolis,” directed by Fritz Lang, 1927
…in the seed of the city of the just, a malignant seed is hidden, in
its turn: the certainty and pride of being in the right—and of being
more just than many others who call themselves more just than
the just.” (162)