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Italo Calvino, in Invisible Cities, portrays a series of conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan that reveal the complex intersection between “real” cities that we build and those that are imagined and exist only in mind. Having traveled much of the world, Polo spins tales of grand and exotic cities. As he speaks, these cities begin to sound like each other and even like places Khan has himself visited or imagined. Khan pushes back on his colleague, asking, “Are these cities real?” And then he describes a city from his own imagination. The line between reality and imagination becomes incredibly confused. Once again, Khan’s city is strikingly similar to one Polo has described. Khan asks Polo to name the city; he responds:
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Constructing Zion: Faith, Grit, and the Realm of Possibilities
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It has neither name nor place. I shall repeat the reason why I was describing it to you: from the number of imaginable cities, we must exclude those whose elements are assembled without a connecting thread, an inner rule, a perspective, a discourse. With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.1 Like Polo, for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the City of Zion embodied both a desire for heaven and a profound fear of the alternative. This study will seek to understand the imaginative spaces of the Latter-day Saint world. I will use a single city block as a metaphor for core concepts that drove the construction of architecture, city spaces, and what the Mormons called Zion, both places and ideas. Block 88 in Salt Lake City displays the Mormon blueprint for the good society, for Zion. This included ideas about relationships between individual members or residents, between human beings and God, and human beings and the spaces they inhabit or imagine in the hereafter. It was also about the components of a good life—a
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