The fictional cities
* 이 글은 아래의 이미지 한 장만을 기준으로 상상으로 작성한 가상의 도시들을 묘사하는 글입니다.
Entwurff Einer Historischen Architectur: in Abbildung unterschiedener berühmten Gebäude des Alterthums und fremder Völcker ; umb aus den Geschicht-büchern, Gedächtnüß-münzen, Ruinen, und eingeholten wahrhafften Abrißen, vor Augen zu stellen — Leipzig, 1725 [Cicognara, 504]
Your Majesty, we are going to talk about a mysterious place, Cidra. It’s mystery lies in its limited documentation, making this city truly hard to describe. The greatest pilgrim in history, Fisher von Erlach, left only one depiction of the place. Thus, the work of imagining Cidra starts with looking at his engraving; the colonnade consisting of dense columns unfolds like a forest disappearing into the seemingly endless horizon. Each column, made by trimming three stones, meets a beautiful catenary line drawn together by bricks, and this structure as the whole supports some unseen spaces or objects that might be on the roof. No one can tell what these structures are supporting, so we can only infer their past purpose or usage from the engraving. This sturdy fortress wall, like the ruin of a fallen kingdom, shows traces of decay everywhere. Perhaps this is not the rampart, but a waterway that carried the massive source of life to a huge and glorious city that might have once flourished, but does not exist anymore. However, the most interesting part of this image is the pilgrim’s choice to cut only a part of this architectural object, enlarging it for the depiction. You do not know where the beginning and end of the building are. Then, your Majesty, the only hint that gives us room for further imagined interpretation is - the plan, placed at the bottom left. It seems that the plan has an endless self-replicating grid system. Suppose if you recognize the thickness of the plan, this may not have been a building after all. If this grid system was stretched endlessly, could this place be a city? Fascinating imagination begins right at this point.
To imagine Cidra, we must start by describing the typical way of entering a traditional city. You must imagine discovering a thick and tall fortress at first glance. You approach a city gate, and a customs officer is watching you with suspicion. Passing through a Massive arch made of small bricks, you enter the city. You are now in the city. Solid and thick fortress walls surround you. You encounter a campo and ask one wild and laughing gypsy for directions.
If you imagine Cidra like this, what you have imagined is wrong. It has a different shape than the usual cities. Rumours of Cidra vary among travellers, but all rumours surrounding the city are commonly based on this form, so the form itself might be the most important characteristic of it. Some say a city exist inside of the bulky walls, while others say it is a long and huge solid box. Another says that Cidra is a flat grid system itself, which makes up the city, not a simple box shape of it. For our purposes, it does not matter which one is true. You will imagine the city while you will listen to my explanation. By doing so, you will finally come to understand the life of the inhabitants that the city’s form supports more than the shape itself.
Cidra can be defined as a linear surface with thickness. Because this surface is like a ghost, it runs through mountains, fields, and neighbouring cities, ignoring the overall natural or man-made context on the planet. The city exploits its linear shape as a driving force to expand and occupy the land with a free attitude. It seems that there are no limits or obstacles to stop this locomotion. It is placeless; you can come across Cidra in a port town like Venice, in a vertical Metropolis like Manhattan, or on a random mountain or river. Still, there is a great diversity of opinion in terms of where the city starts and where it ends. However, one thing is certain: at the point where the surface is plugged into the ground, it provides an entrance into the city by deleting a part of its body, leaving only a minimal architectural language. Travellers call this entrance ‘the bridge’ - perhaps Fisher’s engraving elaborates on one of these bridges.
These entrances have different shapes: a bridge like a forest or camelback, with roofs or huge arches, sometimes perforated railings, and the iterations endless. These bridges are the way to pass Cidra as well as enter the city. Most travellers do not recognize it and walk another week to find Cidra, but end up with arriving at different cities, such as Serbia, Calien or sometimes Rotterm. In a tavern, travellers, who are not so attentively observant enough to notice the entrance, gossip about the city, saying Cidra does not exist in disgruntled tones. However, Cidra exists within those rugged walls. The gate to the city is sometimes raised slightly off the ground, at the end of a long ladder behind a column, or hidden among columns. These hidden doors may imply that Cidra refuses to let people participate.
The huge linear surface faces the outside with many different kinds of windows: tall, pointed, oblong, round, or Ottoman in style. However, because the openings are normally small and high from the ground, no one can see the inside of Cidra from the outside. Through this passive intervention, the architecture of the city is completely free in composition and expression on the facade, remaining only minimal openings on this neutral face. Cidra’s plan resembles the homogenous surface of a Cartesian grid, lattice grid. This grid system consists of the minimal numbers of columns at the intersection of axes to support the life of inhabitants. Moreover, when the origin is intentionally deleted, the plan of the city can be infinitely extended from its origin, and all points on the plan gain equal status beyond their physical distance. In the end, all relathionships achieve equality within the city where its beginning and end stretch out endlessly. Rumour has it that Cidra’s birth was not by an architect, but by an engineer. There is no way to confirm such rumours, but the evidence lies in its design.
However, the shape of the city might not be based solely on simple mathematical calculations by the engineer. On the outside, this box expresses its sublimity that contrasts with natural or artificial landscapes through monumental and monolithic features, and on the inside, it provides a socially and politically neutral field through a Cartesian grid. If you visit the city, you will quickly realize that Cidra is like a maximized ‘system’ where technology, culture and ideology are beaten uniformly and evenly. Because of this homogenous and neutral characteristic, abandoned, displaced, or forgotten people from other cities are eager to find Cidra, trying to be free from all tragic social forms and structures. For those who do not belong anywhere, Cidra is a neutral transit airport where they can escape from their social structures even for a moment.
Perhaps due to these characteristics of the city, there is a rumour that the inhabitants in the city are all immigrants. The truth about it becomes more blurred and distant with rumours. However, there are some other interesting hypotheses about its origin and history. The first is that Cidra was once more glorious than any other city. It is said that there was a time when everyone regarded the city as an incomparable and excellent epitome, but like any historical cities, Cidra has fallen and prospered many times. In times of decline, cities suffered from plague. Girders and cornices collapsed, and repairman became idle. Corrupt officials stopped taking care of the citizens and the city became full of corruption, poverty and alienation.
One day, the citizens tore down a corner of the city and extended it to build a new city. A very lively and joyous time returned to the city and new immigrants were welcomed, but founders failed to notice that as they regained their glory, they were again destroying their city at a terrifying rate. That is how Cidra fell again and went through several periods of corruption and prosperity, and became an endlessly extended city with no beginning and end.
Another hypothesis is that the residents of the city hate their existence. The city floor is slightly raised off the ground. The columns that support the floors are sometimes shortened and lengthened to provide spaces of various levels within the city; the old nanny walks slowly down the ramp, and the children scramble up the small and long ladder to overtake their nanny. Also, because the city already has everything they need, residents do not have to roam the earth. They love nature so much that they value the land from which all nature begins. Or it may be that they miss nature before humans exist. A city is just a means to support human life with minimal mass and volume to protect nature from human beings.
Because the shape of the city should not block the parade of animals and insects, inhabitants sometimes demolished the walls to make a way for animals and insects to pass the city. Disobeying nature’s entropy is their greatest sin, so they mimicked a forest when they built the gate. The most valuable time of the day for them is going up on the roof. The rooftops of the city are already lined with fixed telescopes and binoculars. Right on the rooftop, people enjoy standing and observing the ground through stationary tools. Young lovers revel in their absence on the ground, looking closely at every little leaf, stone, and insect that crawls on the ground.
Other rumors hypothesize that Cidra is a fearsome city controlled by absolute order and strict rules. In an orthogonal scheme inside a city, the distance between intersections is proportional to the speed. There are no traffic jams because all objects move at the same speed, but no one can stop for a break within the city grid. In the middle of the city, there is a huge road that runs constantly and horizontally along a grid. People walk at a steady pace and do not create any confusion. Along this main road, all the stores arranged in a row. Vegetable sellers, butchers, or carpenters alternately look at their customers and goods with the same vacant eyes. No one shows their emotions on their face. As the city just shows the accelerated capitalism to the end, people focus only on their own work; on the surface, they are just a part of a machine. At the intersection of the grid, there is a circular stairway, and people climb the stairs at a steady rate to enter their homes. Every inhabitant of the city is allocated a house of exactly the right size according to the number of their family members. The night passes and morning arrives. Everyone wakes up at the same time to get ready for work as they always do. Cidra might be the city with egalitarianism but without diversity.
In this way, Cidra, a box city, continues to expand its urbanization toward the world while producing, consuming and inhabiting without a stop. Even nature like a mountain cannot stop the movement of quantitative and horizontal expansion of the city. The only limit to stop this maximization seems to be at the edge of the box geomatery itself. However, after long wandering to find the edge, one traveller finally sees the boxes that are infinitely replicated by the mirror in front of his eyes through a small window that touches the expressionless side at what is thought to be the end of the city. Citizens consider themselves owners of the city, but they will never be true owners of the city. No matter how many times the inhabitants change over time, the city’s rules and order are the only owner of the city.
Another rumour is that Cidra may be a huge warehouse or archive rather than a city. They suppose that Cidra was the wall of Florence, the most wondrous city in history. The city walls were built so thick and solid as to symbolize the power of Florence, so everyone thought that Florence’s prosperity would last forever. The Greenwich family, which with their large physical presence and excellent leadership, passed on a custom of maintaining only superior genes through incest. Schneiser, their most outstanding doctor and loyalist warned so many times that repeated hereditary succession could lead to amnesia, but none of the kings listened to him. In the end, this scary pure-bloodism eventually presents the worst curse to the last king, Greenwich XIII. The mad king became suspicious of his subjects and started to kill them if they are suspicious. It is said that the king, blinded by greed and past glories, eventually went completely insane, even forgetting how to use a spoon or fork, and unable to drink even a drop of water without his servant. He forgot every single relationship between the shape and meaning of all objects: tables, chairs, beds, books, and even a crown. He possessed the ability to read but without comprehension. Only one thing he could remember was that the items in his castle were very valuable. One day, he called his last retainer and started moving all the goods inside the rampart. After moving all the items, he ended his life by locking himself inside the rampart. That is how Cidra becomes the relic itself that preserves the glory of the past. The thickness of the walls still preserves its former glory from sunlight, moisture, and wind.
Despite all these hypotheses, travellers still do not know what is truth and what is fiction. The engraving by the great traveller Fischer is the only clue; Cidra might be an endless box made of grids and columns. However, more important than discrediting rumors and discerning truth is imagining the possibilities of Cidra. Your Majesty, at this time, the imagination of Cidra has an wonderful meaning as a fictional ground that allows you to look at your city from a certain distance; the story of Cidra functions as a mirror to see the reality of your city. We talked about possibilities of Cidra to be tragic, glorious, hopeless, or sometimes ideal cities while you are imagining Cidra. Now, you have an opportunity to go back to your city and question it. Perhaps you will find a utopia, dystopia, or heterotopia in your city. It all depends on you to reflect on your city, your Majesty.
