The Invisible Cities

Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili) was written by Italo Calvino in 1972 – a novel made up of prose poetry. It was a description of over 50 cities, given by Marco Polo to the aging Kubla Khan.  This striking animation by Mario Brioschi is inspired by that wonderful novel.

I think it encapsulated the novel very well.  As a result of its approach to the inventive potentialities of cities, Calvino’s work has been used by architects and artists to envisage how cities can be their secret folds, where the human imagination is not necessarily limited by the laws of physics or the limitations of modern urban theory.

It offers an alternative approach to thinking about cities, how they are formed and how they function.