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Agents of Transformation and the "Death" of Urbanism Preeminence of the Decorated Shed Staging Uncertainty |
THREEFrom the high balustrade of the
palace the Great Khan watches his empire grow. First the line of the boundaries had
expanded to embrace conquered territories, but the regiments’ advance encountered
half-deserted regions, scrubby villages of huts, marshes where the rice refused to sprout,
emaciated peoples, dried rivers, reeds. "My empire has grown too far toward the
outside. It is time," the Khan thought, "for it to grow within itself," and
he dreamed of pomegranate groves, the fruit so ripe it burst its skin, zebus browning on
the spit and dripping fat, veins of metal surfacing in landslips with glistening nuggets.
Now many seasons of abundance have filled the granaries. The rivers in flood have borne forests of beams to support the bronze roofs of temples and palaces. Caravans of slaves have shifted mountains of serpentine marble across the continent. The Great Khan contemplates an empire covered with cities that weigh upon the earth and upon mankind, crammed with wealth and traffic, overladen with ornaments and offices, complicated with mechanisms and hierarchies, swollen, tense, ponderous. "The empire is being crushed by its own weight," Kublai thinks, and in his dreams now cities light as kites appear, pierced cities like laces, cities transparent as mosquito netting, cities like leaves’ veins, cities lined like a hand’s palm, filigree cities to be seen through their opaque and fictitious thickness.111 111Calvino, Italo, Invisible Cities, Trans. William Weaver (Harvest/HBJ, 1972) p. 73 |
A Master's Thesis in Architecture at Rice University by Blaine Brownell. Copyright © 1998 by Blaine Brownell. All rights reserved. |
