Greimas’ semiological/grammatological model, known as the semiological square. In this minor masterpiece, Calvino maps out his novel by using A. In How I Wrote One of My Books, one of his lesser known masterpieces devoted to Oulipo (the French surrealist literature group of the 60s), Calvino “explained” how he wrote his Traveler. As architects conventionally define themselves as draughtsmen rather than readers, there exist not a single attempt to reinterpret this text in an archi-fictional way, by taking the cities into account in their entirety, not as singular objects to be visualized or remodeled. In Studio for Potential Architecture (POMI), which is an architectural design course that I have been conducting since 2002, I decided to go deeper, and avoid shallow interpretations – which are not uncommon for this book. The present writer, as a fan of Calvino, made a detour to his oeuvre after 25 years –this time not as a student but as a professor at the school of architecture. For more than forty years Invisible Cities has been a core text for imagination worldwide: It has been, and still is, one of the extensively consumed fictions in architecture schools as a course material, not to mention in studios. Abstract Italo Calvino (1923-1985) is well known to architects as well as architecture students with his book La Citta Invisibili which is in fact part of a trilogy, together with If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979) and The Castle of Crossed Destinies.
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