In a posthumously published interview in The Paris

Review (1992), Calvino discusses the architecture that underpins

all of his books and Invisible Cities in particular.

INTERVIEWER: Turgenev said, ‘I would rather have too little

architecture than too much because that might interfere with the
truth of what I say.’ Could you comment on this with reference to
your writing?

CALVINO: It is true that in the past, say over the past ten years,
the architecture of my books has had a very important place,
perhaps too important. But only when I feel I have achieved a
rigorous structure do I believe I have something that stands on
its own two feet, a complete work. For example, when I began
writing Invisible Cities I had only a vague idea of what the frame,
the architecture of the book would be. But then, little by little, the
design became so important that it carried the entire book; it
became the plot of a book that had no plot.

For Calvino, the book’s “architecture” is its “structure” or “frame.”

And, indeed, Invisible Cities has an incredibly intricate structure
with a double spine or helix: one based on theme and
sequencing that informs the placement of all 55 cities/prose
poems, the other 11 commentaries (between the merchant
Marco Polo and the emperor Kublai Khan) on the cities’ possible
significance and larger patterning. But Calvino and the
interviewer’s exchange also indirectly calls attention to the actual
treatment of architecture within the book.
In many ways, the architecture within the cities is the main,
protean protagonist. The whole collection can be read as a
kaleidoscope of all cities that exist or could possibly exist, with
the various forms, the architecture, reflected in jewel-like shards
and startling combinations. Though Calvino does offer lessons in
creating highly visual and iconic architecture, there are other,
deeper lessons on human perception, control, and time. The
architecture in Invisible Cities goes beyond mere backdrop for
Marco Polo’s recollections to partake in the essential,
multifaceted nature of these cities.

MEMORABLE CITIES

The architecture in every city has an epigrammatic quality. In the

description of the very first city, Diomira, we are introduced to “a
city with sixty silver domes.” This is a very different description
than “a city with silver domes.” The sixty immediately conjures a
word picture, a vivid visual image—whether of sixty concentrated
or scattered domes on a skyline—in the reader’s mind, while
also remaining strangely elusive—why sixty? Of course, there is
a linguistic and poetic answer: the iambs and sibilance of “with
sixty silver domes” is pleasing to the tongue and ear. But the
phrase is far more arresting than mere sound and wordplay.

Calvino’s description recalls the idea that the more precise you
are, the more mysterious. Precision is a mnemonic device that
stores an image in long-term memory (rather than the usual
short-term bin). Calvino gives many of the cities epithets—
Isaura, city of the thousand wells; Octavia, the spider-web city—
that evoke Homer. These epithets allow Marco Polo, our
transfigured Odysseus, to categorize these cities and the distinct
architecture that gives them their identity.
One way to try and explain away the mystery of such precise
descriptions is that Marco Polo is a merchant who has implicitly
taken an inventory of each city. It is essential to his profession to
pay attention to materials and quantities. But early in the
collection, by the third city, our narrator dispels this one-
dimensional reading:

In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira,

city of high bastions. I could tell you how many steps make up
the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’
curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I
already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The
city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the
measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height
of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged
usurper’s swaying feet….

Marco Polo refuses to measure and quantify Zaira. What

becomes more important in this and other cities is the web of
human relationships that subtly transform the architecture:

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the
lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings
of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the
lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in
turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
These human relationships and dramas leave only traces within
the city. Though their “writing” is ultimately an illegible
hieroglyph, composed of “scratches” and “indentations” that you
might find on an ancient “scroll,” these human traces are
essential to a true understanding of the actual, however ghostly,
uses of the city. This human patina is testament to not only the
past but also the living city, the city continuing to exist.
DYNAMIC CITIES

Architecture is not static in Calvino’s cities. The one city with

fixed architecture, Zora, is a city that disappears. Marco Polo
presents Zora as a memory palace with “an armature, a
honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he
wants to remember.” The ancient Greeks and Romans who
perfected this mnemonic technique would have fit right in, for the
“world’s most learned men are those who have memorized
Zora.” But this wisdom comes at a price: “forced to remain
motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily
remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared.
The earth has forgotten her.” The city, lost in rigid mental space,
loses its connection to the tangible, regenerative earth.
Other ideal cities fare no better. The actual Fedora, “that gray
stone metropolis,” contrasts sharply with the ideal Fedoras:

In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a

way of making it the ideal city, but while he constructed his
miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as
before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future
became only a toy in a glass globe.

The city changes too fast; the ideal city cannot keep pace with
the real city and thus, upon construction, is obsolete. But Fedora
does not destroy these “toy” cities. Instead, these glass globes
are placed within a museum at the center or heart of Fedora and
“every inhabitant visits it, chooses the city that corresponds to his
desires, contemplates it, imagining his reflection in its medusa
pond….” Desire, contemplation, and imagination—all fluid
human traits—transform these toys into mental fantasies that
can be reinhabited and enjoyed.
Ultimately, there is no such thing as the ideal city; there is a
multiplicity of refracted ideal cities. The inhabitants choose
someone else’s ideal city and see their own reflections there.
This gesture recalls Diomira, the first city of the collection, with
its strange déjà vu: “But the special quality of this city for the man
who arrives there on a September evening…is that he feels envy
toward those who now believe they have once before lived an
evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that
time.” In this description, the man feels envy for others’ storied
déjà vu. This distortion creates a sense of infinite variation that
permeates the book.

INFINITE CITIES

Within all of the cities, there are more cities. Cities with
remembered or forgotten pasts. Cities with undetermined,
possible futures. Light and heavy cities. Spacious and crowded
cities. Cities infused with human traits and values: happy and
unhappy cities, just and unjust cities. The combinations within
one city are endless.
In Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Calvino’s undelivered
lectures to students at Harvard (he died before he could deliver
them), he devotes an entire lecture to the concept of multiplicity.
As he examines different authors, he defines multiplicity in
various ways: “a network of connections between the events, the
people, and the things of the world”; “the world as a knot, a
tangled skein of yarn”; “a web radiating out from every object”;
and “structures [that]…unite density of invention and expression
with a sense of infinite possibilities.” He likens multiplicity to a
continuous encyclopedia:

What tends to emerge from the great novels of the twentieth

century is the idea of an open encyclopedia, an adjective that
certainly contradicts the noun encyclopedia, which etymologically
implies an attempt to exhaust knowledge of the world by
enclosing it in a circle. But today we can no longer think in terms
of a totality that is not potential, conjectural, and manifold.

Calvino’s definitions of multiplicity help us read Invisible

Cities. Its overall structure and repeating themes create a
“network” and “web” that highlights the “manifold” and “infinite
possibilities” of cities. In many ways, the collection presents an
“open encyclopedia” of cities, where one entry throws the reader
into others. There is the see also of the explicit series: Cities and
Memory, Cities and the Dead, Thin Cities, etc. And, more subtly,
there is the see also of overlapping similarities and contrasts
between cities; for example, comparisons between ideal cities,
cities with similar climates, elevated cities, reflected cities, etc.
In many descriptions, the architecture reflects this multiplicity and
infinity. In Isidora, “buildings have spiral staircases encrusted
with spiral seashells.” The spirals of the seashells are fractals of
the staircases. This description vividly evokes Calvino’s passage
on the open encyclopedia: a spiral literally opens up a circle.
Another example of multiplicity comes in the form of the list.
Marco Polo’s many lists of the places within a city often contain
incongruities: in Tamara, “if a building has no signboard or figure,
its very form and the position it occupies in the city’s order suffice
to indicate its function: the palace, the prison, the mint, the
Pythagorean school, the brothel.” This diverse list contains
multitudes: the upper class with the lower class; the political,
social, and economic with the mathematical and scientific; the
mind with the body.
Such proliferation within cities has a dark side. It leads to many
of the problems that plague cities (and the built environment):
overpopulation (Procopia), sprawl (Penthesilea), non-
biodegradable waste (Leonia), and the destruction of the
environment (Cecilia) and other species (Theodora). Tucked into
these infernos, there is one city that acts cautiously toward
nature. In Andria, the “city and the sky correspond so perfectly”
that any change within the city affects the sky. Marco Polo
explains, “Convinced that every innovation in the city influences
the sky’s pattern, before taking any decision they calculate the
risks and advantages for themselves and for the city and for all
worlds.” Such “prudence” is rare among most inhabitants of
cities.
Despite the infinite possibilities of cities, they do come and go.
Kublai Khan’s fear of “formless ruin” and the “termites’ gnawing”
in the opening section haunts the entire collection.

INVISIBLE CITIES

Though Calvino worries about the problems of modern cities, this

is not the main focus of Invisible Cities. In a lecture delivered at
Columbia University, Calvino explains his intentions:

I believe that I have written something like a last love poem

addressed to the city, at a time when it is becoming increasingly
difficult to live there. It looks, indeed, as if we are approaching a
period of crisis in urban life; and Invisible Cities is like a dream
born out of the heart of the unlivable cities we know…. The
desire of my Marco Polo is to find the hidden reasons which
bring men to live in cities: reasons which remain valid over and
above any crisis.

Calvino aptly characterizes Invisible Cites as “a last love poem,”

for each city is the name of a woman and there are many (half-
heard and half-seen) seductive women within the cities. Even the
titles of the series help to support the enormity of this romance:
memory, desire, signs, eyes, the hidden, etc. This love becomes
an invisible thread, however tenuous, at the heart of the city. It
becomes one of “the hidden reasons which bring men to live in
cities.”
Calvino’s dreams of cities are vivid and idiosyncratic. Their
architecture often verges on the impossible: Zenobia, a city built
on “stilts at various heights, crossing one another, linked by
ladders and hanging sidewalks….” Their architecture can reveal
the often invisible: Armilla, a city with “no walls, no ceilings, no
floors,” with only plumbing, “a forest of pipes that end in taps,
showers, spouts, overflows.” It is a delight to dream along with
Calvino and imagine these inventive cities, even as he weaves in
darker and more complex ideas and themes.

In fact, these complexities help to balance the imaginative flights

of fancy, to invest them with meaning. In his lecture on lightness
in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Calvino defines lightness
as more than escape:

Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I

should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don’t mean
escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to
change my approach, look at the world from a different
perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of
cognition and verification. The images of lightness that I seek
should not fade away like dreams dissolved by the realities of
present and future.

A large part of the lasting power of this imaginative work is in its

conversations with reality. The best fiction, including science
fiction, allows us to see our reality with new eyes, new
understandings. In architecture, imagination pushes the
boundaries of the possible. Many architects and artists, as a brief
internet search or a poll of those you know will tell you, have felt
the impulse to sketch Calvino’s imaginative cities.
Though this impulse to sketch speaks to the cities’ visual and
tactile power, the more important lesson for architects is more
cognitive. The invisible and visible should always be in dialogue,
for within the invisible, there is the imaginative, creative, and
possible. And perhaps even more important is an awareness that
invisible perspectives—influenced by memories, desires,
relationships, and other human traits—transform architecture.
Our role as architects is to give our architecture, in all its
complex and distinct forms, the space to change over time, to
keep pace with the unpredictable and dynamic.