MIRABILIA URBIS: A WONDERFUL HISTORY

Never wonder: wonderment is the second name of ignorance.
—Indian saying

WONDER IS THE SUM OF a thought plus an emotion. It is sometimes the result of an intention, sometimes simply the way by which cultures and traditions (which, as such, are rarely conscious of the reasons for their being) manifest themselves. City and architecture have always been a source of wonders; a space, or the artistic manipulation of a space, generates a reaction in those who live there. From mirage, architecture becomes wonder.

That this is all the more true now than in the past is certain. The problem is to understand

print December 1985

THE LAND OF CUCKOONEBULOPOLIS AND AFTER

Science continuously struggles against the realism of language and the realism of the imagination.
—Maurice Blanchot

IN THE LATE 19th century, and coinciding, significantly, with the formation of the modern myth of the metropolis and the appearance of the skyscraper, a new theme appears in the visual universe of images of the city and its architecture: the way buildings are shown rising into the air suggests an ideal of freeing them from their foundations in the earth. This fantasy of ascension ultimately describes buildings hovering in the sky, released from the constraints of gravity and