Invisible Cities

Published January 25, 2023

The Architectural Sketching and Environments course presents students with a unique experience. Throughout the semester, the class examines modern perspectives on the physical environment, uncovering the relationship between natural and constructed. Using sketching as a medium to see, feel and think, students draw their surroundings, ranging in content and scale from human movement, to built structures, to natural spaces. Students focus on enhancing their ability to draw from imagination and establishing a conceptual perspective from the mind. Through drawing, students can find themselves participating in an act of discovery. It is important for designers to be able to perceive a written visual and translate it to paper. However, this process is different for everyone. Students worked on creating visuals in the form of a physical object set within a landscape at an unattainable distance, or through a visual dreamt up within their mind. Architectural sketching is a skillset aspiring architects and designers develop through time and practice. Invisible Cities, a series of illustrations by Samantha Fox, draws inspiration from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities – a book that describes Venice as a series of fantastical places. Calvino depicts cities of various terrains, scales and inhabitants. By reading excerpts from Invisible Cities, Fox created her own city, Arborea: a city perched in the trees, and a tight-knit community interconnected by bridges and zip lines. The city is lit by hanging lanterns, sparking it alive day and night. Building these cities through a mixed media of micron pen and copic marker allowed the city to come to life, and viewers to imagine themselves there.

Invisible Cities illustration, Arborea.