Masters Thesis: "The Lightness of the City"
Context - Kilamba, Angola
2017
Thesis Statement: "The Lightness of the City”
How will an architecture of lightness bring forth a wonder in that ambiguous paradoxical condition that is human desire, to transcend the purely rational productive model of city building?
Abstract:
Calvino sees lightness as a powerful lens through which to understand a work of art. This approach can also be applied to a city, whose inherent nature is heavy.
In the mostly unoccupied new city of Kilamba, built in Angola with Chinese money and Chinese labor, emptiness itself is a paradoxical weight. The intent of this thesis is to oppose the rational powers that shaped Kilamba with intuitive, Dionysian modes of resistance, to bring together modern and local historical conditions through a resistive third-party, to transcend the hegemonic political and technological forces that keep them separate and give them weight. Architecture is, in this mode, a poetic accident, uncovering a lightness “that defines the variety of things (in an) essential parity.” The elements of the city—oil, ivory, copper, …—are summoned to dissolve the solidity of that world into “a fine dust of atoms,” allowing the city to raise itself above its weight. The city itself becomes a work of art.
Project Description:
Italo Calvino described that “lightness” was to be the first of six categories of human thought that would emerge in the twenty-first century theoretical condition. Architecture is an analogical reference to the theory of lightness that can manifest itself in the city. Lightness brings forth a wonder of things in that ambiguous condition that is human desire, which transcends our own mortality for the divine.[1] Architectural poetics are revealed as a ‘human condition’ by virtue of a wonder in tension between the self-seclusion of the earth and the ‘lightness’ of the heavens (Heidegger). The world remains open within the lightness of the city.
The human condition within the geographies of social practice are related between the three moments of the perceived, the conceived and the lived in Henri Lefebvre’s “Production of Space.” Representations of the body as bodily ‘lived’ experience are derived from accumulated scientific knowledge occurring at the intersection of culture, will lose its immediacy when treated as an abstract model. The first step is to treat lived experience as socially constructed by knowledge in becoming a productive model.
The right to the city then becomes a collective rather than an individual right to reestablish ourselves and our cities to claim some kind of “shaping power” in which “our cities are made and re-made in a fundamental and radical way.”[2] The architectural notion of lightness may be the conceptual vehicle by way of a radical departure from the modern urban condition. Lightness brings forth a wonder in that ambiguous paradoxical condition that is human desire that will then transcend the purely rational productive model of city building (Arendt).
Lightness is embodied in Dionysian modes of resistance to the rational power that intuitively shapes the city of Kilamba, Angola. Modern and local historical conditions are brought together by a resistive third-party that transcends the hegemonic political and technological forces that keep them separate. The poetic accident uncovers this quality of lightness “that defines the variety of things” in an “essential parity”.[3] In doing so, we see the solidity of the world tends to dissolve into “a fine dust of atoms” and humanity raises itself above its own weight with a flight into a new realm.[4] Italo Calvino sees this as a change in approach, by looking at the world from a different perspective.[5] The city is now seen as a work of art,[6] where something emerges out of nothing as in the original accident that created the universe.
After the Year 3000:
In time, the city’s rational structure dematerializes and slowly fades into “whiteness” like a cloud that approaches a state between sky and vapor. Typologies are grounded in elongated shadows as a poetic reflection of its “original” form.
After centuries of struggle and renewal, a city-artefact emerges in the next millennium carrying forth ancient ritual form encapsulated in the female being. At its heart, lies a childcare center the size of a city block that defies our rational understanding of scale and materiality. At its periphery unfold intuitive gestures of infrastructure protecting the city center only to be accessed by formative gateways marked by architectural monuments along its boundary. In this new light, the idea of Kilamba dissolves, and a balance is achieved between its rational constructs with intuitive foresight and ritual history...
[1]Marco Frascari, A Light, Six-Sided, Paradoxical Fight, Nexus Network Journal, vol. 4, no. 2 (Spring 2002), http://www.nexusjournal.com/Frascari_v4n2.html
[2]David Harvey. “The Right to the City.” http://www.davidharvey.org/media/righttothecity.pdf.
[3]Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium. (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2002), 9.
[4]Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium. 8, 12, 20, 28.
[5]Ibid., 7.
[6]Aldo Rossi, Introduction by Peter Eisenman, The Architecture of the City. (The MIT Press, 1982)
