In Hunayn’s conception, pneuma – a kind of circulatory air – travels forward from the brain, along the red curving lines in the image, enters the eye from the back, causes the pupil to dilate, then travels out, into the air, encounters the object that is seen, which reshapes the pneuma, the new shape travelling back to the eye and allowing the object to be seen. This sounds fanciful today, yet neuroscience’s discovery that more back-to-front brain activity happens when we look, than front-to-back, means that Hunayn was metaphorically, in part, right.
In its golden age, Baghdad, the largest city in the world, housed an estimated 1,200,000 people. By the beginning of the twentieth century its population had dropped to 145,000. This grew rapidly when the city became the capital of Iraq. Oil income boosted construction in the 1970s, but war in the 1980s, political authoritarianism and corruption, and then invasion and more war in the new millennium, brought the city to its knees. The lenses of the world’s reporters were trained anew on the suffering of the videodrome.
The storytelling of Kailasa, the Processional Way of Babylon, the circle citadels of Rome’s Colosseum and of Baghdad: the kinds of looking that these afforded – suspenseful, clustered, oppressive, learned – give us a developing sense of looking in cities. In more recent centuries, our visual sense has continued to be shaped by architects and urbanists.
ESFAHAN
‘Esfahan is half the world,’ say the Iranians. On the four-hour drive from Tehran, your eyes get accustomed to desert landscapes, dusky-yellow and red earth, glaring sunlight and wide vistas. The city’s outskirts are industrial, noisy and polluted. The unclean air removes whites and blacks, making the street scene shades of grey. At its centre, the city opens out into one of the largest squares in the world, and at its southern edge there is a grand portal to the Emami mosque, completed in the early 1600s. It leads to dark, enclosed, echoing chambers which turn you and your eyelines right and left, and then there is this reveal.
On the left, a sublime iwan, or framed pointed-arch entrance, is covered with glistening haft rangi – seven colour – tiles, including Iranian and Turkish blue, black, white and gold. The blue sky echoes the deeper of the blues. The iwan’s form is reminiscent of the flat, but highly decorated, façade of Notre Dame in Paris. It stands proud of two stacked colonnades of similar shaped niches, and when your eyes follow those you notice that the pattern is repeated on all four sides, as if four Notre Dames stand facing each other. But walk to the centre of this inner courtyard and the reflecting pool makes the four look like eight, and the gold-blue glisten shimmers in the water. The overall effect of these 18 million bricks and 475,000 tiles is to create an illusion: this space looks aquatic. There are Koranic verses and descriptions of the five pillars of Islam (prayer, giving to the poor, profession of faith, fasting and pilgrimage), but as well as traditional, the aesthetic is modernist. This mosque is a colour field, redolent of a Jackson Pollock drip painting or one of Yves Klein’s meditations on blue. A place like this reminds us that Islam has its mystical strain, practised by Sufis.
The designers of the Emami mosque drew on Islamic design and architectural traditions, refining them and simplifying them in some ways, to create a visual experience of great equilibrium. The aim was contemplation rather than sensation. The geometry and restrained colour, the lack of figurative decoration, gave a sense that the city beyond, with its everyday living, had been erased or muted.
To the other types of looking we have seen in buildings and cities, we can therefore add sanctuary looking, the feeling of the cloister, the uninterrupted, contemplative place. Cities that were built within a small time frame, such as Brazil’s capital Brasilia, are also able to plan a spatial regime from scratch, so that little interferes with the overall visual scheme. But in most urban spaces, randomness, unpredictability and the specifics of everyday life scatter any original visual purity that there was, and successive ideas about buildings and society jostle for attention. This was a product of the cluster of ancient cities, but it is also visible in more recent examples.
YOKOHAMA
Some city looking is timeless. Take this image, for example, from a Japanese film, Pale Flower.
How unlike a blue sky or the savannah, or even the Emami mosque this is. Three trees poke up into an otherwise built world – the city of Yokohama. There is no empty space here. Everything fights with everything else for our attention. Foreground and background have similar weight. Do we look at the arch at the far end of the bridge, or the people walking towards us, or the cars on the left, or the shaded window on the right, or the electric cables running through the image? There is so much to take in.
Types of concrete had been used in building construction since the 6000s BCE; the Romans added horse hair and volcanic ash to it, and used it in structures like the roof of the Pantheon in Rome. Concrete was sculptural; it allowed buildings to be shaped in new ways. Asian cities have higher average population densities than Western cities, so things are more visually crammed and layered; you could say that they are the most city-like of cities. After taking in the clutter in this built environment – the directions, actions, attractions – our eyes might land on one of the thirty people, and we might imagine where they are going. As well as the quantity of things to look at, we can see ideas here. An arch is the sign of a threshold; it tells the residents that they are moving into a new neighbourhood. The buildings look onto the river and the three trees, giving views of them. Nature is something to be arrived at, to be directed towards. And this intersection shows that the city is designed to be moved through in different directions and at different speeds: the strolling walker, the car driver and the riverboat user, bringing goods into or through the city, all coexist. Their speeds are not separated into different zones. Our Japanese city (the film’s opening scenes suggest that the setting is Tokyo, but it was actually shot in Yokohama because the latter has narrower lanes and looks more like a maze) extends our sense of how we look in cities. To suspense, cluster, oppression and learning, add randomness and simultaneity.
Director Masahiro Shinoda says that Pale Flower was influenced by the French writer Charles Baudelaire, whose reaction to cities we will encounter in the nineteenth century. And we will look at tall buildings when we get to the twentieth century. Cities have always been imagined before they were built. Babylon did not need a gateway as extravagant as its one dedicated to Ishtar. Baghdad did not need to be circular. In each case a form and scale were envisaged, then the city was built to fit that vision.
METROPOLIS
Cities, then, have always started as future things. In 1927, this was the future.
It is a moment from Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis. An aeroplane flies between buildings, walkways connect the top of structures. It is still busy and multidirectional, like the Japanese city, but now life has become airborne. Living and travelling takes place in the sky. City life has some of the lightness of air. Yet Lang’s film was a hierarchical city and a critique of cities. Its story tells of worker exploitation and revolt. One character imagines another as the whore of Babylon, and a club is called Yoshiwara, after Tokyo’s sex district. Metropolis folded into itself ancient cities, Japanese cities and modernism.
ASTANA
And here is another city of vistas