Word: kublai
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...WANING light of the imperial sun the great Kublai Khan listens to the words of a young explorer from Venice. The Khan's dominions have grown in scope and compass out of understanding, their diverse, unimagined wonders lost in last formlessness. As Marco Polo describes the fantastic cities he has visited in his wanderings, his words are a dam against despair. The emperor hopes to discern in them, "through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing...
Each of Calvino's parables comes from a single mold, and so do each of Marco Polo's cities. As the catalogue progresses, anachronisms begin to creep into the explorer's narrative, and his empire begins to expand outward in time as well as space. Kublai Kahn discovers this...
...place is the last example of idealized, high-despotic city planning, a rich hick cousin of all the imaginary and perfect townships that architects from Filarete in the 15th century to Boullée in the 18th wrought from their schematic, authoritarian fantasies but never managed to build. Unlike Kublai Khan's pleasure dome, it exists on a plane of unremitting kitsch, sustained by the most advanced technology ever brought to the service of entertainment...
Over the headquarters gate are the Roman numeral four and some words in Vietnamese. The congressman asked if Kublai Khan had built the area. The general said he understood it had been the French. Must be hell to have everything in your country built by somebody else, said the congressman...