Invisible Armilla (Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino)
KUCD Typography2, 2016
Project : Visualization of Invisible City : < Invisible Cities >, written by Italo Calvino
이탈로 칼비노의 소설 < 보이지 않는 도시들 > 에 나오는 도시를 하나 선택해 시각화하는 작업
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THIN CITIES3, ARMILLA
섬세한 도시3, 아르밀라 : 요정 나이아드들이 살고 있는 수도관으로만 이루어진 물의 도시
poster, 2016
420 x 594 mm (A2)
국문 / Korean(Hangeul) Ver.
영문 / English Ver.
poster, 2016
297 x 420 mm (A3)
postcard, 2016
148 x 210 mm (A5)
postcard, 2016
148 x 210 mm (A5)
THIN CITIES3, ARMILLA (Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino)
Whether Armilla is like this because it is unfinished or because it has been deolished, whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim, I do not know. The fact remains that it has no wall, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizon- tally where the floors should be: a forest of pipes that end in taps, show- ers, spouts, overflows. Against the sky a lavabo’s white stands out, or a bathtub, or some other porcelain, like late fruit still hanging from the boughs. You would think the plumbers had finished their job and gone away before the bricklayers arived; or else their hydraulic systems, inde- structible, had survived a catastrophe, an earthquake, or the corrosion of termites.
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Abandoned before or after it was inhabited, Armilla cannot be called de- serted. At any hour, raising your eyes among the pipes, you are likely to glimpse a young woman, or many young women, slender, not tall of stat- ure, luxuriating in the bathtubs or arching their backs under the showers suspended in the void, washing or drying or perfuming themselves, or comning their long hair at a morror. In the sun, the threads of water fan- ning from the showers glisten, the jets of the taps, the spurts, the splashes, the sponges’ suds.
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I have come to this explanation: the streams of water channeled in the pipes of Armilla have remained in the possession of nymphs and naiads. Accustomed to traveling along underground veins, they found it easy to traveling along underground veins, they found it easy to enter into the new aquatic realm, to burst from multiple fountains, to find new mirrors, new games, new ways of enjoying the water. Their invasion may have driven out the human beings, or Armilla may have been built by humans as a votive affering to win the favor of the nymphs, offended at the misuse of the waters. In any case, now they seem content, these maidens: in the morning you hear them singing.
