Hong Kong architect William Lim and the Italo Calvino novel that changed his life, Invisible Cities

In Italian postmodern novelist Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1974), Marco Polo narrates tales from his journey to meet Kublai Khan through a collection of 55 short prose poems describing fictitious cities, interspersed with metatextual conversations between the pair.

Intricately patterned and rich in poetic imagery, it is both an unconventional architectural manifesto and a meditation on such weighty subjects as time, memory, the subjectivity of experience and the inadequacies of language. Architect, artist and art collector William Lim explains how – in its best-known translation, by Calvino collaborator William Weaver – the book changed his life.

I read Invisible Cities when I was in my first year of architecture school, at Cornell University, in the United States, in about 1976. I was maybe 18. It’s almost like a bible for architecture students. It wasn’t part of the course, but it was something everyone had to read, so I bought a copy.

It’s a very unusual book. I was used to reading novels, but the structure of this book is completely different. It’s extremely conceptual and very architectural in its structure. We deal with a lot of concepts in architecture and almost every project needs to have a theme running through it. And each chapter of this book has a concept – the strong character of a city that you’ll remember.

Architects have to present ideas and verbalise what we design; like the book, we need to structure concepts in verbal form. Also, the structure of the book is like a series of columns – each chapter is a column that holds up the building.

What’s also interesting is the way each chapter is structured. This approach shows that it’s not the physical aspect of a city that’s most memorable – it’s really the people and the things that happen there. I found this insightful from an architecture and urban planning point of view.