"Empty space creates a richly filled time"

Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, Giorgio de Chirico, 1914

Ivan Chtcheglov's 1953 'Formulary for a New Urbanism' is everybody's favourite example of Situationist psychogeographix loonie prose. It certainly is one the most accessible and likeable works in the corpus from which many people have quoted and after which the Manchester Hacienda was named. I have always been baffled with Debord upping jaded, sentimental Claude Lorrain and Chtcheglov here, while mentioning Lorrain, recommends clean, graphic and controlled De Chirico as his favourite place where to find inspiration for the construction of the emotively charged spaces of the future.

De Chirico remains one of the most remarkable architectural precursors. He was grappling with the problems of absences and presences in time and space.

We know that an object that is not consciously noticed at the time of a first visit can, by its absence during subsequent visits, provoke an indefinable impression: as a result of this sighting backward in time, the absence of the object becomes a presence one can feel. More precisely: although the quality of the impression generally remains indefinite, it nevertheless varies with the nature of the removed object and the importance accorded it by the visitor, ranging from serene joy to terror. (It is of no particular significance that in this specific case memory is the vehicle of these feelings; I only selected this example for its convenience.)

In De Chirico’s paintings (during his Arcade period) an empty space creates a richly filled time. It is easy to imagine the fantastic future possibilities of such architecture and its influence on the masses. We can have nothing but contempt for a century that relegates such blueprints to its so-called museums.

The Peasant of Paris

Louis Aragon's 'Paris Peasant' (1926) is a pioneering effort in urban travel writing that without the historic pedigree of the author as co-founder of the Surrealist Movement would have been long out of print as a curious timepiece by a talented author too young to keep his adolescent vanity in check. The first part is a deep topography of the last days of an arcade before its demolition of the new Paris, the second part is a contrived elegy on nature and gardening and place that combines originality with rapturous unreadability. In spirit the things it comes closest to in my mind is Sinclair's Light out for the Territory.

The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lighthouses of the mind, with their outward resemblance to less pure symbols. The gateway to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness. One false step, one slurred syllable together reveal a man's thoughts. The disquieting atmospheres of places contains similar locks which cannot be bolted fast against infinity. Wherever the living pursue particularly ambiguous activities, the inanimate may sometimes assume the reflection of their most secret motives: and thus our cities are people with unrecognized sphinxes which will never stop the passing dreamer and ask him mortal questions unless he first projects his meditations, his absence of mind, towards them.