mcgill university / fall 2016
individual
instructor: prof. ricardo castro
individual
instructor: prof. ricardo castro
We were tasked with representing one of the cities from Italo Calvino's book, "Invisible Cities" in one of the ancient architectural styles we had covered in our history class. For my panel, I decided to depict Baucis, the city that stands above the clouds on stilts and whose inhabitants have always hid away from the eyes of onlookers.
Excerpt from Invisible Cities:
Cities and Eyes 3
After a seven days’ march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foliage.
There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.
(Invisible Cities: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co, page 68)