In the coastline’s haze, the sailor discerns the city form of a camel’s withers, an embroidered saddle with glittering fringe between two spotted humps, advancing and swaying he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wineskins and bags of candied fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself at the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea, toward oases of fresh water in the palm trees’ jagged shade, toward palaces of thick, whitewashed walls, tiled courts where girls are dancing barefoot, moving their arms, half-hidden by their veils, and half-revealed. When the camel driver sees, at the horizon of the tableland, the pinnacles of the skyscrapers come into view, the radar antennae, the white and red windsocks flapping, the chimneys belching smoke, he thinks of a ship he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off, with the breeze already swelling the sails, not yet unfurled, or a steamboat with its boiler vibrating in the iron keel and he thinks of all the ports the foreign merchandise the cranes unload on the 1 docks, the taverns where crews of different flags break bottles over one another’s heads, the lighted, ground floor windows, each with a woman combing her hair. The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea. They know the net will last only so long.ĭespina, Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972ĭespina can be reached in two ways, by ship or by camel. Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung below: rope ladders, hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water, gas jets, spits, baskets on strings, dumb-waiters, showers, trapezes and rings for children’s games, cable cars, chandeliers, pots with trailing plants. This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as passage and as support. Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past farther down you can glimpse the chasm’s bed. You walk on the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces, or you cling to the hempen strands. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. Now I will tell how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. Or an intuitive part of our invisible inner worlds.Octavia, Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972 We are putting together images of cities with their own rules, cities from other universes, cities which may become an alternative to existing structures By doing so, it is letting us be in silence. I am creating a city without gravity or horizon, which can tear us from a real situation and drag us into its subtly variable environment. Of objects using hidden suspension, rules of architecture and laws oį physicsare shed from the image of the city. By multiple projections of small objects, and by creating light ethereal movement All of these projects have become essential features of the installation, which is a visual transcription of a story about the Invisible City.īuildings unrealized, which means unreal or invisible, previously surviving as only two-dimensional floor plans, are transformed into spatial objects, which become separate entities grouped into a new spatial structure. Unrealized competition proposals such as the Chicago Tribune Column by Adolf Loos, Gočár’s proposal for the completion of the Prague Old Town Hall and buildings that have eventually disappeared such as the commercial center Ještěd by Sial or the floating theater by the Italian architect Aldo Rossi and others. Projects of unrealized or unrealizable architecture by the Utopians Claude Nicolas Ledoux and Etienne-Louis Boullée. The Invisible City is a three-dimensional multimedia installation in which drawing came to life, moving in a space. … “The Empire is being pushed by its own weight, Kublai Khan is thinking and in his dreams, there are cities light like kites, perforated like lace, transparent like mosquito nets, cities like ribbing of leaves, as lines of a palm, filigree cities so delicate that you can see through their matt and fictitious thickness.” … / Excerpt from the book The Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino 1972/
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