The City of Imagination

A book launch for The City of Imagination (ORO Editions, 2020), a collection of over 150 drawings by faculty member Valerio Morabito. The book includes a forward by James Corner (MLA‘86), CEO at James Corner Field Operations and past chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture, and an afterword by David Leatherbarrow, professor emeritus of architecture. 

Program
Introduction: Richard Weller
Morabito's Line: James Corner
The City of Imagination: David Leatherbarrow
Imagining Cities and More: Valerio Morabito
 

From the authors
It is in the wilderness of cities rather than in nature that the imagination for the drawings in this book comes to life. Without any heroic emphasis, they result from observation of traces, evident or discreet, in the imperfect urban landscapes. In these urban landscapes, trees have been my most frequent travel companions, drawing spaces, places, perceptions, imaginations, and visions of many cities. Sometimes, cities are trees themselves; for example, the dancing city of Shenzhen, or the landscape City rises, where trees cover the whole city with their vast, surreal, and unreal canopies. Sometimes trees are part of the ornaments of cities, and other times they design cities by controlling every centimeter of their spaces. When trees make up the cities of imagination, these cities are the expression of a utopian idea of nature and humans living together. The drawings in this book represent cities that could have been and could be but are not; an exercise in the search for ideas—an imagining of what could be.

The City of Imagination is a journey around the world, a collection of traces from many different cities. Their shape and memory become the primary medium for creating imagined new cities. No single drawing in this book is a representation of a city in-situ; all of them are interpretations, translations, and combinations of many different places. This selected collection of over 150 drawings delineates a personal city idea that is free from any geometrical and shape conditioning. The drawings are also tributes to Italo Calvino, who is a source of inspiration. Calvino had, and still has, an essential role in writing and imagining the lightness of my cities.

Presented by the Department of Landscape Architecture.

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu to let us know what you need. Please note, we require at least 48 hours’ notice. If you register within 48 hours of this event, we won’t be able to secure the appropriate accommodations.