Cornell University Architecture, Art and Planning

Faculty:           Prof. Pedro Erber
Degree:           M.S. AAD
Semester:      Spring 2019
Duration:        1 Semester
Site :               City from Memory
Type :             Architecture Research, Urban design, City planning,
                         Phenomenology.

“When I think of architecture, images come to my mind, images of worlds different from ours. I believe our world is a collection of overlapping microcosms of different scales, we enter and exit these microcosms daily, but few of them are so small or large in scale that it becomes inconceivable to us. Like the space between the complex matrix of a sponge or a trabecular structure of a bone; between the growth of branches in a tree or spaces in between the riverine system of a river; in the complex neural network of our brain or the networks of streets in our cities. Everything has a world of its own, we have our own world built through interactions of forces from the outside world.”

Cities are the greatest inventions of human civilization because it is not a static object in space, but a living organism in time, always in the state of flux; ever-changing and eternal. When I think about the city, I wonder, what will be my city, how do you define my city, how do one associate oneself with one city, cities predates me and will certainly postdate me, they are large and ever-growing, It will be impossible for me to know the city completely throughout, and it is even more difficult to associate with one city when we live in a globalized world where we perceive the world as one global village at the same time we are divided by borders, states, continents, race, language, ethnicity, economy, religion, and political affiliations. It’s even more difficult to associate when we know that the notion of affiliation lays the foundation to divide oneself from the rest.

Being born in the internet age, I am more familiar with New York City, from its Central Park to Brooklyn Bridge, from Broadway to Times Square, from Flatiron to Empire State buildings, the city I have never been before, then the city I have lived most of my life, this brings us to the most important point in the 21st century where the media and technology becomes the dictators of the culture in a society. In the era were Instagram dictates the flow of tourist, google maps changing the traffic movement in our cities to online reviews turning a restaurant into a tourist attraction.

Reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible cities inspired me a lot during my undergraduate studies – which led me to believe that traveling changes your notion of this world and what you take for granted in one society would put you at risk of execution in another. It broadens your perception of the world, and it liberates you and allows you to perceive a society without prejudice and preconception. With this intention in mind, I developed my interest of walking across global cities like Cairo, Jerusalem, Amman, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Ahmadabad, Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Sydney, Colombo, Dubai, and New York. One can only perceive these cities in slow-motion and observing the changes in its skyline, streetscape, activity, culture, food and even smell varies from one end of the city to another end. One of the most evident is Tokyo and Yokohama two cities close to each other and physically inseparable, but as you walk across them. You can feel that both are completely different cities even the smell of the city is completely different; makes you question the very geographic proximity to the two cities.

From my travel experience and opportunity to live in many cities, I started to believe that it is impossible to associate oneself with a city or call one city like my city as we are associated with only a fragment of a city, like the neighborhood of our residence or work, the streets that we commune frequently, the neighborhood of friends and family, the shopping districts or the cultural or recreational districts, the whole notion of a city is a construct of these fragments of the city that we are associated with not the city in entirety. If we have lived in various cities, then the city would be a construct of various fragments of various cities.

If we closely observe the conversation between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Invisible cities, we could imagine those cities to be the cities Marco Polo visited during his expeditions or each city could be a fragment of a big city. This uncertainty around the validity of facts that these cities exist, leads us to question the very existence of these cities and this uncertainty with the narration that describes the city with characters far from reality, allows us to imagine these cities and construct it in our own imagination, which makes us fantasize about them, making them mystical. We could obnoxiously argue the very basis on which these cities are built on, could also be a narration of a trip Marco Polo took to Disney Land with his kids last summer and when Kublai Khan demanded to entertain after being drunk, Marco polo had no choice but to construct a story from his visit to Disney Land. Let us not take this stance but assume that these cities exist either in fiction or reality in Marco Polo’s life, in that case, how can we interpret our own cities in this format? how do you construct a city from your own experience? Going back to our previous question, how do you take ownership of one city if you have lived in multiple cities? This paper looks into answering these questions by constructing an Empirical City, built on the experience and life one lived in these cities. Stitched from fragments of experience and knowledge one gained throughout their time living or traveling through those cities.