INVISIBLE CITIES

Institution: CUNY The City College of New York

Instructors: Jeremy Edminston Kaitlin Faherty

Semester: Fall 2022

Software: ArcGIS, Grasshopper, Rhinoceros amenities shortest path to restaurants.

Unit 23 is a yearlong graduate studio focusing on architectural form. A site was selected and documented through drawings. The site is the Textile Building (295 Fifth Ave.), and the drawings of this site dictate the direction of the architectural proposal.

The drawings of 295 Fifth Ave. direct the project towards the novel “Invisible Cities” written by Italo Calvino. The novel consists of nine chapters each consisting of five themes. Readers are invited to read the novel in any order, crafting their own narrative of the story.

Using the novel as a Literary Provocateur, this project centers on the narrative of Hidden Cities, where Calvino describes two contrasting cities, when they are actually one. How can architecture situate not one, but two cities inside a space?

There are 25 million combinations from each of the four layers. Each combination different narrative of the city.

The process of constructing a city is similar to Italo Calvino’s “Invisible connected. amenities and stacked. combinations one can construct using a line combination yields a new story with a story with different narratives of the “Invisible Cities.”

The narrative chosen as a Literary Provocateur where Calvino writes of two opposite one and the same.

Provocateur is section Hidden Cities, opposite cities, when in actuality, they are

contextualizing each map onto a floor plate.

Floor plate. Superimposing a grid.

Transforming the maps by block group.

contextualizing each map onto a floor plate (continued).

Display corresponding data for each transformed block group. For this process, the data corresponds to the Median Household Income map.

Extrude each block group by its corresponding data, relative relative to the ceiling height. Remove top 10% of the total extrusions. Repeat for the bottom 10% of the total extrusions.