Reading cities by line has become a complicated chore in 2025. There are incongruent movements on the city streets, with all manner of debris and flotsam that collude to control our vision, distorting the potential of reading the city by line and encroaching on a sense of the city and our environment as orderly, maintained, or transparent to its aims. Instead, they are overdetermined by consumerism and advertising. They are laden with a chaos of movement and rapidity that castrates flow for the sake of the individualized desires associated with capitalism. We, trapped in our cars, careen through and around cyclists, buses, and the errant pedestrian wrapped in the garment of consumerism.

Our municipal arteries choked, the relational understanding of our cities is one mired in a frenzied and flailing circuitry, cables unable to contain the vast stored energy that feeds its incessant activity. Excessive buildup, like plaque on aging teeth, distorts our horizon, signaling a desperation and claustrophobia that exceeds our ability to create congruent lines and direct the conduits we developed through modernism, no matter how towering or ambitious, without symmetry and clarity of vision in mind. Our cities are not as we were promised; instead, they are quagmires of overbuild, each corner razed and rebuilt, defined less by its constants than its susceptibility to change, economy, and the palimpsest of change bracketing our streets and byways.

One can find our original plans for the clarity of cities echoing in the artwork of the times, particularly in sympathy with Piet Mondrian, whose Broadway Boogie Woogie, from 1943, asked the viewer to understand the grid and orderliness of the city of New York, with a nod toward its burgeoning and lively jazz, suggesting that the city, could maintain its progressive energy, while also carrying its denizens and flow through linear pathways, not alltogether different from how with view neuronal synapsis moving its currents through the electrified human brain, pathways carved not by a crude chisel, but by the orderly passageways of biological life.

With Pino Musi, the reason I wanted to suggest the clogging of our cities is that when I look at the work found in his new book Polyphōnia, I feel an unburdening of line. I sense order born from the chaos of contemporary living. An Italian based in Paris, Musi is the creator of a series of remarkable books that demonstrate a profound understanding of architecture, cities, history, and modern art. In fact, I follow him avidly to see what gems he finds on his bookshelves or out and about at exhibitions, as his taste is, like his eye, are keen, resolute, and elevated. I understand his sensibilities.

There is an orderliness to his interests and work that almost presents as Zen-like, cold, yet not cruel, observations of facades, buildings, and ruins, arranged compositionally with a heightened sense of proportion and scale. His work reflects a formal understanding of the relationship between an object, its utility, and a profound sense of space. In Polyphōnia, the approach is very calculated, and the book serves as an extension of the work he published in his last book, Border Soundscapes. Both are designed by Giulia Boccarossa, a leading young light in photobook design with whom I have had the honor of working. Her front cover mirrors what is found on Border Soundscapes, but on Polyphōnia, it shows her increased precision and graphic design elevation that has occurred between books. It is a phenomenal gesture to a brilliant book of photographs, and pairing Pino and Giulia seems to be a sensible combination, as both authors understand the assignment to work between architecture and its sonorous equivalents, which are hinted at through both titles.

On sound and the books, Border Soundscapes instills a sense of the audible in the work, with Musi playing with his architectural and city interest points in a modular, musical note visuality with dark windows and contrasty edifices allowing a kind of musical tabliture to form in the mind of the viewer, at a stretch similar to sheet music, thus proposing a way to understand the syncopation of a city and its form. In Polyphōnia, there is an apparent reference to György Sándor Ligeti and his musical accompaniment to Christopher Wheeler’s 2001 ballet of the same name. Here, we might stretch our imagination to movement and form with sound as an indelible reference, not too far from Brodovitch’s photobook Ballet, though with less grain. Buildings, however immobile, stand in for the ballet of the cities’ structure instead of its bodies. The play of references, mediums, forms, and acknowledgements makes Musi’s work that much more profound.

Polyphōnia will be one of my books of the year, along with Yana Kononova and Bernard Fuchs’s books. I look forward to every new Musi title, as it offers me a vast canvas to express myself on. This is the effect of his intentional and clinically beautiful use of composition, as well as his nod to multiple forms of experience. I can see from his extensive catalog of work something consistent, like Koudelka, but also a body of work that evolves into increasingly higher planes of skill, thought, and exemplary uses of form and line. If you are interested in Lewis Baltz, Josef Koudelka, E. O. Hoppe, El Lissitzky, Erich Mendelsohn, The Bechers, or any other notable photographers and photobook makers, this will be something for you. Highly Recommended.

Pino Musi

Polyphōnia

Dario Cimorelli Editore