By retracing here the relations between Calvino, urbanism, and utopian thought in the ’60s, it will be possible later (chs. 3 and 4) to demonstrate his familiarity not only with the Italian schools of architectural history, theory, and design, but also with trends beyond Italy by dint of his editorial post at Einaudi. The ideas of a handful of international fi gures greatly pressed on the
panorama of speculations in those years. The theories issuing from urbanists Gyorgy Kepes (1906–2001) and Kevin Lynch centered on the individual’s relationship to his or her urban environment—which is to say, on experienc- ing and imagining the city. Kepes’s education of vision and Lynch’s mental imaging of the city would prove pivotal to Calvino’s 1972 work.
In the wake of World War II, the artistic and political sectors in the United States initiated an intricate debate about a new way of seeing; an elaborate and multihued refl ection on the urban environment as a site of aesthetic experience and its relationship to human psychology, quality of life, and social welfare. Centered on a cluster of key texts engendered by Gestalt psychology, the debate sparked great interest in the phenomenology of the urban setting and in the potential of art and architecture to revital- ize the imagination of city dwellers, thus enhancing their perception of the urban environment.18 A principal voice in that debate was Kepes, the
Hungarian theorist and artist whose books on visual studies and the urban setting were widely read in the U.S. and Europe throughout the ’60s and ’70s. Kepes had moved to the U.S. in 1937. Like Santillana, the historian of science at MIT whom Calvino occasionally visited and whose works he read assiduously, Kepes lived among European expatriates in the Greater Boston area. He taught at MIT, fi rst in the School of Architecture and Plan- ning, then in the Center of Advanced Visual Studies, which he founded and which became especially active in the late ’60s.
Kepes’s thought was disseminated in English in Italy in the ’60s. In 1970, his essay “Note sull’espressione e la comunicazione nel paesaggio urbano” (“Notes on Expression and Communication in the Urban Landscape”) was included in the collection Il futuro della metropoli (The Future of the
Metropolis) prefaced by architect Giancarlo de Carlo, who deemed Kepes’s
the most stimulating essay in the book with respect to understanding the generation of urban forms. Kepes’s Language of Vision (1944) appeared in Italian translation (Il linguaggio della visione) in 1971. In France at least six translations of his works were published between 1967 and 1968: Edu-
cation de la vision (1967); La structure dans les arts et dans les sciences
(1967); Module, proportion, symé trie, rythme (1968); Signe, image, sym-
bole (1968); Nature et art du mouvement (1968); and L’objet cré é (1968).
In both of Calvino’s homes, then, Kepes enjoyed a following among intel- lectuals, which explains why he fi gured in Ali Baba’s cave of books, as Celati called it.
It is not diffi cult to visualize the links between Kepes’s thought and Calvino’s philosophy of vision and the imagination. Two facets of the Hun- garian’s work on vision and the city are especially relevant to the retroterra of Invisible Cities. First, Kepes ardently promoted the need to cultivate imaginative and visual abilities in humans. Second, he rooted his work in the search for a renewed visual perception of the urban environment, studying how vision and motion were interlaced in the images of mod- ern cityscapes. Kepes strove to recreate a meaningful relationship between
individuals and their urban environment, believing that the city had lost its ability to create in its inhabitants a true sense of belonging.
Like Calvino in Six Memos, Kepes refl ected on the new image of the world made possible by science and technology, which were revealing sub- nuclear particles, pulsars, DNA, and inorganic crystals. He integrated art and technology to create sensorial (especially visual) urban experiences that might make residents more aware of their own imprisonment (as Calvino would later phrase it) in an urban environment that had lost its vitality. Kepes linked the poverty of the urban experience to the poverty of the human imagination. His guiding purpose, therefore, was to regenerate the imagination through the visual show, believing that the use of colors and luminous projections could play a relevant role, as exemplifi ed by Fernand Léger’s urban design projects. Léger, a painter and sculptor who originally trained as an architect, was greatly admired by Calvino.
In his Language of Vision, a foundational phenomenological study of the environment, Kepes argued for a visual reeducation that would teach city dwellers how perception works and how to unlearn ordinary ways of seeing in order to see anew (Hayakawa 9–10). This was not, according to Kepes, a primarily aesthetic project: it was, rather, a thorough rethinking and retrain- ing of the ways of seeing that was needed to get beyond the cliché images in which human representations of the world had become trapped. Two decades later, in his 1965 Education of Vision, he approached visual thinking as a cognitive activity, arguing that only “imaginative power of creative vision” (Kepes, Introd., Education of Vision ii) could heal the formlessness of con- temporary life. That imaginative power was damaged, underfed, and impov- erished, imprisoned in a spiral of self-destruction that could be counteracted only by reeducating human vision to reclaim lost sensibilities.19
Motivated by a strong ethical charge, Kepes’s works cast a long shadow over the intellectual horizon of the period. After enjoying fourteen reprints in the United States and becoming required reading for Italian urbanism in the ’60s, Language of Vision was fi nally translated into Italian in 1971, strikingly echoing some of Calvino’s speculations on the formlessness of present life. Kepes explained that his era was experiencing a chaos that had dulled and even decimated the human imagination and visual perception (12–13). He recognized in the language of vision an ethical and activist dimension that would prove to be similar to Calvino’s own, calling for “the dynamic idioms of the visual imagery to mobilize the creative imagina- tion for positive social action, and direct it toward positive social goals” (14). Along the same lines as the Italian novelist, albeit more explicitly, the Hungarian urbanist recognized the fundamental role played by artists and intellectuals in developing a new language of vision or way of seeing and sharing it with the public: “we see as the painters, sculptors, architects, photographers, advertising designers teach us to see. The social value of the representational image is, therefore, that it may give us education for a new standard of vision” (67).
In Italy, Kepes’s work on enhancing the visual perception of the city came to have even greater resonance due to his installation of The City
by Night, an exhibit on environmental art for the 14th Triennial Inter-
national Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts and Architecture held at the Palazzo dell’Arte in Milan (30 May to 28 July 1968). The theme of the 14th triennial was “The Great Number,” under which fell the issues linked to the explosive and uncontrolled growth of contemporary society as was seen earlier (ch. 2). Ironically, The City
by Night originally had been scheduled to open in the spring of 1968
but was damaged in the student protests sweeping Italy in the preceding months (Guenzi). Kepes’s installation consisted of a gallery of architec- tonic wings and pierced false ceiling designed to intermittently project lights and images illuminated from inside. Accompanying this urban vision was a sequence of recorded urban sounds coming as if at random from stereo speakers placed on the sides of the gallery (Nicolin 3). The
City by Night aimed to reeducate people about the effects of light on
the urban environment and to recharge urban theory by recharging the urban imaginary.
Kepes’s refl ections on reimagining or re-visioning the city derived in part from his association with Lynch at the Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies, which had been founded in 1959 to bring together scholars from MIT and Harvard who were working on urban problems and solutions. In 1964 there appeared L’immagine della città, the fi rst Italian translation of Lynch’s 1960 The Image of the City, in which he acknowledged his intel- lectual debts to Kepes, whose conceptualizations of the imagination and vision in urban environments had shaped his own study. L’immagine della
città was a resounding success in Italy, where it would be cited repeatedly
in proposals for urban redevelopment,and in France, where it appeared in translation fi ve years after the Italian translation.
From the moment of its publication, Image of the City became required reading for urban planners. A book about the look of cities and the meaning of urban landscape as an artistic object “to be seen, to be remembered, and to delight in” (v), the study was to correlate closely with Calvino’s emphasis on the role of the imagination, as well as with his effort towards visibility in his 1972 work. The American urbanist scrutinized the mental image that citizens hold of a city and concentrated on the quality of this image: how clear, legible, recognizable is it? In Calvino’s words, several years later: how
visible is it? As architect Gian Carlo Guarda put it in his introduction to the
Italian translation, L’immagine della città, urban forms play a life-shaping role: an urban environment that can be visualized helps people get where they need to go, avoiding the annoyance and dangers of disorientation, and thereby helps them to establish a secure emotional relationship with the outside world (Lynch 16). Lynch offered an analogy with the legibility of a printed page: just like a legible page “can be visually grasped as a related pattern of recognizable symbols,” so a “legible city would be one whose
districts or landmarks or pathways are easily identifi able and are easily grouped into an over-all pattern” (3). It was crucial to analyze the city as it was perceived by residents because their possession of a mental image of the city made them feel less emotionally lost. In order to foster this mental picture, the city setting must have sharp, distinctive, legible images that not only offer security but also might heighten the depth and intensity of daily life in the visual chaos of the modern city (3–5). Such images constituted the language of the urban environment that, when “visually well put forth, . . . can also have strong expressive meaning” (5).
Lynch’s insistence that the urban resident be trained to participate in the perception and creation of urban images in order to interact meaning- fully with the city sheds light on Marco Polo’s relationship with the object world in the novel, and is wholly consonant with the value that Calvino assigned to the imagination. Several aspects of Lynch’s conceptualization of the urban resident in relation to the physical world deserve comment as they can increase our understanding of Calvino’s intentions.
First, the image that Lynch’s ideal city-dwellers seek and that Calvino was to recreate in his novel, is not “a fi nal but an open-ended order, capable of continuous further development” that will allow “the individual to con- tinue to investigate and organize reality” (6–9). Lynch viewed the process of visualization or creating mental images of the city like the creation of a drawing, in a section entitled “Building the Image.” In a city’s image, as in images on a page, there should be blank spaces where residents and visitors can continue the sketch on their own. Every drawing requires fi rst the rec- ognition of an object as a distinct or separable entity distinct from the con- tinuum, and such an entity must hold practical or emotional meaning for the observer (8–9). A process of identifi cation of the city’s single units—a process that discerns discontinuity within the continuous—is what Calvino was to install within his most acclaimed and popular novel, in which a city’s total image is refracted in a profusion of single units, each highly icastic. Lynch, one of his main infl uences, was pointing out in the mid ’60s the parts that play a role in the formation of mental images of the city, rather than the whole: an artifi cial fragmentation of “a continuous fi eld,” as he put it (67). (The similarities to Barthes’ emphasis on image-making are obvious).
Another aspect of Lynch’s work that would resonate in Invisible Cit-
ies is his analytical attention to the variety of ways in which a city can be
perceived by different observers, and by the same observer under different circumstances. The mental image of a city varies according to the individ- ual observer’s personal memories, associations, background, temperament, and occupation; the scale of the area observed; the vantage point; the time of year or of day. Lynch therefore speaks of the shifting image: “rather than a single comprehensive image for the entire environment, there seemed to be sets of images, which more or less overlapped and interrelated” (85). If the goal of urban planners should be that of creating continuity between
different images of the city (according to Lynch), Calvino chose to empha- size the disparity among various mental images for ontological and heu- ristic purposes. This deliberate fragmentation or perceptual fl uidity, in Calvino and in Lynch, was shaped by “secular shifts in the physical reality around [them]” (Lynch 86) that change the city and the perception of the city through time.
Urban planners should be trained to build highly imageable cities, Lynch insisted. He defi ned imageability as
that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer. It is that shape, color, or arrangement which facilitates the making of vividly identifi ed, pow- erfully structured, highly useful mental images of the environment. It might also be called legibility, or perhaps visibility in a heightened sense, where objects are not only able to be seen, but are presented sharply and intensely to the senses. (Lynch 9–10)
Although city planners should begin to design imageable urban environments, Lynch was adamant that a “retraining of the perceiver” was equally urgent. He underlined the necessity of acquiring cognitive ability—of becoming able to recognize and give meaning—and, most of all, of an acute vision able to distinguish new images amongst the habitual ones. To improve the quality of the image in the mind, “training the observer, by teaching him to look at his city, to observe its manifold forms and how they mesh with one another” was of signal importance (117 [my emphasis]). This perceptual learning, he argued, would enable urban residents to critically interpret scenes by recog- nizing hidden or camoufl aged aspects not immediately visible (11–12). In a passage that was to be of great and obvious consequence for Calvino’s novel, Lynch wrote: “we must learn to see the hidden forms in the vast sprawl of our cities. . . . Our thesis is that we are now able to develop our image of the environment by operation on the external physical shape as well as by an internal learning process. Indeed, the complexity of our environment now compels us to do so” (12 [my emphasis]).
Lynch revealed his debts to Kepes as he detailed an education of vision that should draw from various disciplines in order to change the city and the world:
In the development of the image, education in seeing will be quite as important as the reshaping of what is seen. Indeed, they together form a circular, or hopefully a spiral, process: visual education impelling the
citizen to act upon his visual world, and this action causing him to see even more acutely. A highly developed art of urban design is linked to
the creation of a critical and attentive audience. If art and audience
grow together, then our cities will be a source of daily enjoyment to
The ethical and social value of imaginative literature that Calvino set down in the essays analyzed earlier (ch. 1) distinctly overlaps with this insistence on “training to see,” or educazione a vedere (L’immagine della città 134), and on cultivating a “critical and attentive audience.” Perhaps it was not by accident that Lynch himself appears to stray into fi ction, after hinting at the anthropo- logical roots of the need for imageability. The urban theorist refers to a fi gure who meshes with Calvino’s essay on visibility in Six Memos and its emphasis on training the imagination to produce bright, exact, vivid images:
Our environmental image is still a fundamental part of our equipment for living, but for most people it is probably much less vivid and particular today. In a recent story of fantasy [“Shoddy Lands”], C. S. Lewis imag- ines that he has entered someone’s else mind, and is moving about in her image of the outside world. There is a gray light, but nothing that could be called a sky. There are vague, dingy green shapes, blob-like, without anatomy that he peers at and fi nally identifi es as Shoddy Trees. There is soft stuff underneath, of a dull grassy color but without separate blades. The closer he looks, the more vague and smudged it all becomes. (124)
THE MORTAL CITY AND THE ENDURING CITY: