"The Lightness of the City"

Calvino sees lightness as a powerful lens through which to understand a work of art. This approach can also be applied to a city, whose inherent nature is heavy.In the mostly unoccupied new city of Kilamba, emptiness itself is a paradoxical weight. The intent of this thesis is to oppose the rational powers that shaped Kilamba with intuitive, Dionysian modes of resistance, to bring together modern and local historical conditions through a resistive third-party, to transcend the hegemonic political and technological forces that keep them separate and give them weight. Architecture is, in this mode, a poetic accident, uncovering a lightness “that defines the variety of things (in an) essential parity.” The elements of the city are summoned to dissolve the solidity of that world into “a fine dust of atoms,” allowing the city to raise itself above its weight. The city itself becomes a work of art.