![]() No one remembers what need or command or desire drove Zenobia’s founders to give their city this form, and so there is no telling whether it was satisfied by the city as we see it today, which has perhaps grown through successive superimpositions from the first, now undecipherable plan. Now I shall tell of the city of Zenobia, which is wonderful in this fashion: although set on dry terrain it stands on high pilings, and the houses are of bamboo and zinc, with many platforms and balconies placed on stilts at various heights, crossing one another, linked by ladders and hanging side-walks surmounted by cone-roofed belvederes, barrels storing water, weather vanes, jutting pulleys, and fish poles, and cranes. Zenobia City, Karina Puente Zenobia, Colleen Corradi Brannigan Zenobia, Maria Monsonet Here are a few culled from the internet if you feel so moved, feel free to add your own favorites (or your own!) below. So, this Sunday being Italo Calvino’s birthday, it seems as good a time as any to share some of the treatments artists have given various cities from what is probably his most beloved book. Every once in a while, I’ll see some gorgeous image pop up in a search, and it will seem familiar to me somehow-when I click, I’ll find that it’s another vision of Octavia, or Zenobia, in one of its infinite possible permutations. But it isn’t only avid readers who are fans of Invisible Cities (though I’d wager a strong percentage of the novel’s fans are writers) many artists, designers, and architects have also taken inspiration from Calvino’s imaginary cityscapes and invented architectures-whether overtly or indirectly-and I frequently hear of this book being used in design and art classes of all levels. And I quickly figured out that other people like this book too. I took Invisible Cities out of the library. I couldn’t report you many specific details from the book now-there’s not much story to speak of-but I remember the feeling of sitting in the grass and reading it, feeling the coldness of it, the sense of being sucked into another dimension, a series of images both dreamlike and exact, a pleasure simultaneously visceral and intellectual. I couldn’t see more than two feet in front of my face. My relationship had just exploded, and I was very depressed I only knew one person in town, and she was in rapturous love with her new boyfriend. ![]() I was working a tedious job at my college over one summer, living in a strange dorm room with no internet. In this case, dreams and desires are represented on top and fear is represented underground.Sometimes I like to think that Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities saved my life, but it might be more accurate to say it saved my mind. The city on top is a happy city, with kites and elevated streets, while down below there is a mining city, with no light and where you have to work all day long and are trapped. So, I represented a city on top of another city. Calvino talks about how you think you are happy living inside her but you really aren’t – about that duality. Puente continues: "I could tell you about how I decided to make Anastasia, which is part of the chapter Cities and Desire. There is something magical about people living close together." The more hectic a city is, the more interesting for me. One of the things that deeply interests me is the powerful exchange of knowledge that happens in cities and the multiple and diverse sociocultural interchange we witness. ![]() "I am interested in all of them, tiny, huge, historic, creative, problematic or cosmopolitan every single one has something worth admiring. In an interview with Kindle, Puente has stated how she finds cities "absolutely amazing," and even more so about metropolises and megalopolises. According to Puente, "each illustration has a conceptual process, some of which take more time than others." Usually "I research, think, and ideate over each city for three weeks before making sketches." The final drawings and cut-outs take around a week to produce. Invisible Cities, which imagines fictional conversations between the (real-life) Venetian explorer Marco Polo and the aged Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, has been instrumental in framing approaches to urban discourse and the form of the city. This latest series of mixed media collages, drawn mainly using ink on paper, brings together another sequence of imagined places – each referencing a city imagined in the book. Her initial collection, which ArchDaily published in 2016, traced Cities and Memories. Lima-based architect Karina Puente has a personal project: to illustrate each and every "invisible" city from Italo Calvino's 1972 novel. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |