little thoughts...
Below some thoughts I've been having from some redings I've been doing, it is not an actual text but just some quick ideas...I am using quotes as part of this "text" as I think are really good...
I am still not sture if I should situate the self-portrait in Philadelphia, I ordered some books about Philadelphia so, probablly it helps, Jhon Noel thought could be helpful just in terms to "make it happen"...
"Charles Dickens once said that he lived in perpetual dread of any sudden new discovery about shakespeare: the revelation of a letter, and image, a biographical fact, anything that might disturb his life's fine mystery."
"The ideal Shakespeare for Dickens is the Shakespeare we have, a genius and an absolute blank. Inmortal invisible, unimaginably wise: something like God Almighty"
The City, in this sense, is like Shakespeare, it doesn't have a face and the way we look at it and undertsand the urban space varies depending from were we experience The City and on how we experience its spaces.
The self-portrait of the City is made by all and not by the architect, sometimes _like Haussmann's renovation of Paris_ the architect wants to visualize the city as its own creation. Cutting through the old Paris of dense and irregular medieval alleyways into a more rationally designed city with wide avenues and open spaces which extended outwards far beyond the old city limits, (similar to Exodus by Rem Koolhaas or even The City of the Captive Globe, Plan Voisin by Le Corbusier and many more)
We all visualize the city in some way and precisely because of its diversity sometimes the architect wants to print its image on it. But "self-portraits catch your eye-come across them in a gallery and you experience a strange shock of recognition. For in picturing oneselves as an artist does on a self-portrait, artist reveal sometimes far more than physical looks: the truth about how they hope to be viewed by the world, and how they wish to see themselves."
The city becomes the stage set for of our self-portraits it is our studio, our canavas. "The way we consult the mirror to question our appearance, rearrange our look"
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