Thursday 18 September 2014

Invisible Cities

I took some time today to read though extracts of Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities", which described a number of bizarre and specialised city concepts. While each one had a bizarre quality, I was breathtaken as my mind began to visualise portions of each one, or what they would look like upon approach. Each one was strange, sometimes mindbending in its visualisation. But each of those extracts I read I was captivated by.the imagery of the city it was trying to portray no matter how impossible the reality would have been such as fixings and baths suspended in the air by nothing but the pipes that supply them with water.

Some cities were beautiful, some were haunting, none of them could be considered perfect as each one had perhaps some measure of flaw. Perhaps because for some of them, they were designed to fit only a specific human need, but they do hint as to how vast and complex real cities can get.

1 comment:

  1. Hey Mark,

    To help you with these visualisation exercises try googling "invisible cities" there is some pretty nifty stuff out there visualisation is but one step. Research is a tool, use it to dig into your extracts, hell assign them at a different period in time or reimagine how they would be built from a different perspective...

    Have fun with it.
    xXStItChXx

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