THE POSSIBLE CITY | omero MARCHETTI

THE POSSIBLE CITY And now this dreamed but possible city takes its shapes, beautiful, logic, friendly, as I know cities will be from now for the next two hundred years. I have seen her from the sea, during the night. A quiet night, under an unknown, soft blue sky. I was sailing. But I wasn’t able to recognize the coast profile, or the boat. It wasn’t my own sailing yacht. And the sea wasn’t my sea, the Mediterranean Sea, where my boat, Magia, was quietly mooring in some place. The coast line was pointed by mysterious towers lighting in the darkness, the highest towers I’d ever seen, almost burned by an interior, volcanic, inextinguishable light, scraping the vault of the firmament, ruffling the eternal course of the constellations. Towers, similar among them but at the same time completely different, grown with the same law but in a different way, as twelve trees of the same species, identical for bearing, leaves, height, flowers and fruits, and still very different. And suddenly I understood how much it was in excess all this fuss over creating absurdly confused skylines, with heterogeneous buildings, competing by form and height, colour and material, in a so artefact and chaotic way as I’ve already seen in other seafronts. Mysterious shapes, crystals of salt outstretched against the deep blue of the sky. Sensitive and intelligent glass walls, that during the day caught heat from the sun and gave it back disguised as energy and light. Mysterious and inexplicable to the eyes of the nocturnal sailor, with his pupils hover between the Little Bear and an unknown and never narrated coast. Structured inside with the same logic with which the water becomes snowflakes, along paths of unattainable simplicity and clarity. Faceted and crushed geometries, that owe nothing to formal invention as they are daughters of an implicit logic in aggregation of the primary elements of matter, so few, so alone, and yet able to construct the infinite universe that may be distinguished in the starry nights. Crystals. Explored, admired with awe that is renewed day after day, the beauty of discovering instead of putting hands inn the invention, journey into the sidereal depths of a silent and secret beauty in search of the possible code of the absolute. On plan these buildings seem to be growing up from a telluric joint, full of different waters and solidified under the sky just as clear, transparent, random and different rock salt scraps. Different but joined together by an aggregation law, unique and inexplicable polymorphic, so sensitive to record in its very DNA the casual englobing of a pollen clot, of a spore, of a swerve of wind, of a blade of light. Faceted, crushed schemes, that really form a unique, huge photosensible mirrors system tilted to absorb solar energy during all the arc of the day and of the year. The towers were the highest ones I’ve ever seen, not less than a sea mile. Those buildings had powerful, wide basements that seemed the wings of big sea birds, folded in order to cover their chicks, and it appeared to me they covered entire blocks with their shadow, not only single portions of space of plain squares or malls. The open spaces were covered by thick vegetation, made possible on a sandy and desert coast by water recycling that through underground streams fed secretly meadows, and flowers, and luxuriant palm fields. Inside the towers, residents breathed air caught in open sea, freshened up during its journey under the water, or caught directly from the top of the towers. The air flowed through secret veins in accordance with physics law, without any contribution of external energy, simply supporting the dynamic’s law of fluids. The transparent façades have been built by a double sequence of rooms among crystals and within them the perpetually moving air brought coolness and environmental well being. The crystal surface externally had the weave of ancient oriental silks, a very delicate texture of silicon cells converted light and warmth in clean and perpetual energy. The inside wall was made of polarized crystal, and the happy residents, with the simple touch of a switch, created all the privacy they desired. Everything is logic, natural, mathematic, clean, the closest I’ve ever seen drawn to that profile of absolute mathematic beauty subtending the Universe. Everything in its place with bound, sequential connections, and the project’s efforts seemed to be directed towards the intuition, concentrated on the discovery of the traces, the existing truths, and not towards the invention. There are no geometries of Brunelleschi, of Alberti or of the twentieth century masters modulating the built because they do not suffice anymore, and the “I exist because I doubt”, foundation of modern thought, within a pencil explodes because prevented from alluding to certainties, also if only “sub species” of symmetric and reassuring figures. DÈJA VU. For weeks, I’ve been obsessed by my dream. I tried to understand during many months where was that mysterious coast, that unknown sky. Someone explained to me that the sensation we feel sometimes to live something we’ve already lived (the French people speak about déja vu), is not because we have lived a previous former life, but because in the moment God created our soul, and for just an instant, we look into the Creator’s eyes, and in that very moment He discloses us the eternity, the past and the future, included our future. I want to imagine I’ve seen the skyline of this mysterious City in that exact moment. CLEVER CITY LIFE A beautiful city, where buildings, even if different between each other, have a mutual law of growth, and are not opposing in an at-any-rate competition of originality, transforming the urban landscape in a sort of world vanity fair for planners, motivated by the anxiety to astonish instead of the attention for who will live in that city, will weave their own business relationships, will give a future to his children. A friendly city, where will be possible not only to move from the office to the mall, from restaurants and to the homes, immersed in conditioned air, but also where entire parts of urban tissue, with roads, squares and gardens will be directly accessible for taking a walk, chatting, for cultivating friendships. An ethic city, that lives by the solar energy, the light, the wind, the logical breath of Universe and its laws, a City that makes its fundamental axis of addressing and development based on wisdom and knowledge of the matter laws, a City that uses its resources with the same care applied in using, saving and exploitation as 10.000 years ago. Even if here at the moment there is an abundance of natural resources. And I think that, just because there is such an availability of resources, we can invest on the beyond, on the next challenge, on the city breathing the sea air, synthesizing energy like trees with its leaves, catching water from its roots, growing with mathematical logics, arranging branches and leaves to capture food and future from the environment. An appropriate city, that was thought and designed for this land, gathering and developing the suggestions of these plane and sandy horizons, of this deep and dazzling light, of plough in the night by these light castles that are the boats travelling in the offing, and that in a sort of reciprocal game reflect each other, over the round line of those towers glimpsed so full of light, so mysterious. But this is a hard game! This is a challenge that put everything to risk, that should imply a revolution in the way of thinking, an extreme updating of design and fabrication processes, should imply investments. From now and for the next one hundred years, cities will be exactly as we have glimpsed in these lines. And we can start to draw them. Now.