Stage 1 students on the BA (Hons) Architecture course have brought Italo Calvino’s ‘Zenobia’, from his novel Invisible Cities, to life in their first mini project as part of AR318 Form Finding module.
Invisible Cities was initially written as a travel guide in 1972 in Italian by the Cuban writer Italo Calvino. The book explores the power of words and the imagination; an explorer, Marco Polo, describes a series of imaginary cities to the emperor, Kublai Khan. They are prose poems, probably inspired by Venice, which illustrate many aspects of the city; its culture, language, time, memory and death and through these they offer the reader an insight into the human experience. Over the course of two weeks, the students worked on their interpretations of a passage from the classic novel which describes the city of Zenobia, through illustrations and model-making.
MA Architectural Visualisation student, Olegk Stathopoulos, documented the assembly of their take on Zenobia outside the Marlowe Building and created a great short film which you can watch here.