Telling Dark Cities: glimpsing the future through shared imagery

Since the development of a sequential and panoramatic vision, and since the birth of the languages of the metropolis (cinema, photography and comics) the city has had an elective relationship with the narrative dimension that allows the opening of a negotiating environment with respect to the tactile experience of urban space (Walter Benjamin) and the intensification of nervous life (Georg Simmel). The essay investigates the influence between narration understood as an element of the creative process and the narratives that results from the architectural project with particular reference to the language of comics. In particular we focused on the narrative strategies relating to the representation of the city of tomorrow. Through visual references that include contributions from literature and science fiction movies, we will highlight modes of mise en page that codify themes such as vertigo, the leap of scale, the uncanny and the representation of catastrophe: from the Piranesi’s Prisons of Invention (1760) to Antonio Sant'Elia's work on the Città Nuova (1914), from Hugh Ferris' renderings for the book Metropolis fo Tomorrow (1916) to Erich Kettelhut's studies for Fritz Lang's Metropolis sets (1925), arriving at the group of artists (including Moebius and Druillet) who have gravitated around thw production of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982). The aesthetics of vertigo is articulated in a reflection on the theme of scale, understood as the (dis)proportion between the human and the city, the sublime (according to Edmund Burke's reflection) and the uncanny in architecture (according to Sigmund Freud and Anthony Vidler's contributions). The last subject of this analysis is the story of the urban apocalypse, an obscure reflection of science fiction and technological imagery since the end of the 19th century. Fundamental in this part of the work will be the reflection developed by Alain Musset on the theme of urban apocalypse in science fiction narratives. This path is articulated in the light of the theses of Paul Ricoeur, Juhani Pallasmaa and Tim Ingold on the narrative dimension of space and design. This openness of the dialogue between space and narration makes it possible to understand a series of themes and keys to interpretation on the topicality of built space (such as the weird and the eerie) that repopulate the urban perception of phantasmagoria borrowed from literary and cinematographic production. The negotiating space between body and city thus becomes the place of sedimentation of the imaginary and at the same time of orientation of the trajectories of fruition and interaction with the urban fabric.