OFFICE 19

This city, designed for 500,000 residents, is organised as a sequence of rooms that are formed by ‘city walls’. The city walls are a composition of cruciform buildings that represent two-thirds of the built mass of the city. They form the habitable architectonic structure of the city. The spaces between the city walls are rooms without content, providing the space for further urban development. The future content is the furniture of the rooms. The plan seeks to define the form of the city in a rigid manner, without lapsing into the naïve modernistic ideal of the city as a fixed, predetermined organisation of buildings. The city walls and city rooms form the ‘genesis’ of the city, its bare facts. In this manner they fulfil the only role that can be ascribed to architecture: providing a specific inertia against the instability of life itself.