Statement
Invisible Cities is the work of Italo Calvino who is an Italian author. Not a single city portrayed in it can be recognized. The author gave a female name to these invented cities respectively. This book is composed of several short chapters. Every chapter makes us reflect on some city or cities in general meaning. According to the description of Andria city in Cities and the Sky 5, I built an abstract city model. Layout of Andria is designed according to the order of constellations. I divide the model into five districts according to the luminance and orbits of stars. Irregular triangles are adopted to demonstrate the rhythm and order of stars. Cities hanging in the sky showing information of its corresponding constellation secretly in the shade cast by lights.
An excerpt from chapter“Cities and the Sky 5” in Invisible Cities
Andria was built so artfully that its every street follows a planet's orbit, and the buildings and the places of community life repeat the order of the constellations and the position of the most luminous stars: Antares, Alpheratz, Capricorn, the Cepheids. The city's calendar is so regulated that jobs and offices and ceremonies are arranged in a map corresponding to the firmament on that date: and thus the days on earth and the nights in the sky reflect each other.
Though it is painstakingly regimented, the city's life flows calmly like the motion of the celestial bodies and it acquires the inevitability of phenomena not subject to human caprice. In praising Andria's citizens for their productive industry and their spiritual ease, I was led to say: I can well understand how you, feeling yourselves part of an unchanging heaven, cogs in a meticulous clockwork, take care not to make the slightest change in your city and your habits. Andria is the only city I know where it is best to remain motionless in time.
They looked at one another dumbfounded. "But why? Whoever said such a thing?" And they led me to visit a suspended street recently opened over a bamboo grove, a shadow-theater under construction in the place of the municipal kennels, now moved to the pavilions of the former lazaretto, abolished when the last plague victims were cured, and -- just inaugurated -- a river port, a statue of Thales, a toboggan slide.
