Unlived Dreams
Architecture 1- Professor Jack Wilson
Summer 2018
Staples, Chicken Wire, Foamcore, Red Artistic Wire
Bringing Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities to life.
“In the center of Fedora, that grey stone metropolis, stands a metal building with a crystal globe in every room. In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future, became only a toy in a glass globe.”
(Calvino 32)
The idea of a stoic, grey metropolis drew me to homogenous cityscapes of concrete and steel, blending together into nothingness. I used staples as the primary medium so that the metal block-like forms evoke a feeling of conservatism; despite creative and new ideas, the city is slow to change and dreams are left abandoned. As the centerpiece of the story, the tower lies in the middle of the city, of which only a quadrant was made. The surrounding skyscrapers and buildings crowd toward the tower but moving outward, the structures become more abstract and unfinished — representing the slow transition to disarray and lost potential. The red wire loops through the city like a thread of fate, tying together the past and present. The space in the middle of the city was inspired by my favorite place in New York: Central Park; a lone triumph for nature and creatives in a world so focused on modernization and progress.
