Beijing Opacity

CITYVISION – BEIJING OPACITY The urban spatiality is not corrupted by the ceaseless transformations of reality or by a horizon of abiding modification. Beijing allows to live in a changing territory, in a real and spatial dimension subjected to fast accelerations caused by the unfolding of technologies. The city does not host an alienated community or a society that pretends to live, nor a ‘show society’, of fiction, of individuals dispossessed of their potentialities and spirituality; there are not people who transfer their creativity exclusively to exchange values. The drawing describes the vision of an interior matt city, not democratically see-through as the one originated from modernism but populated by inner landscapes. At first sight it is not a dispersed and atopic city but it is a place with its own identity, many identities indeed, in which it is possible to orientate oneself and to get lost; the city is open to relationships and defined at the same time, flexible to inescapable developments, a concentration of qualities. This is not a city of pioneers, it is for special or post-human beings. Along the opacity of places and surfaces, the city exchanges occur through composit pulsations, connected by their nature with energy, time and movement. They are originated by a double vibration, a horizontal and a vertical one: the first one, mainly external, connects the city with the natural environment, it links its infrastructures and it conforms itself to the territory; the second one, built and dwelled, it is permeable to the wind and penetrated by every kind of light, by sound, by voices and even by smells, or by any other vibrations to communicate and to connect, to join together the earth and the sky. Waving spaces are cities structured in unique organisms, they are the desired and planned phenomenon: they are permeated by different cultures and thoughts, visions in convergence, which create new worlds. They are the projection of a mental, interior landscape and of outer places which create identity and belonging, orienting the geographies of old and new cultures. Dwelling these swings in the space means seeing oneself in motion but mainly looking yourself inside.