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The Friday Fillip
This one’s a strange one. It’s an imaginary city — the city of Galvez — revealed in a slideshow. The texture of the place, the skewing of the known into a 1930’s future-city, is what makes it strange. On top of that there’s a melancholy music track behind the pictures that evokes, for me at least, a kind of nostalgia for things that never were.
Once you’ve clicked on the main picture to get things going, choose the link to the slideshow that you’ll find on the upper right of the screen. You can, of course, go through the pictures one at a time if you prefer.
Ah imaginary cities.
Then you must read Italo Calvino’s wonderful book, which had been illustrated at http://www.cittainvisibili.com/index-en.htm – however the text is much stranger and magical than the pictures.
For Calvino see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Cities
For illustrations based upon the work see http://rodcorp.typepad.com/rodcorp/2003/09/illustrated_inv.html
and http://calvino.lib.ru/english/mainframeset.html
Edward Tufte the scourge of sloppy graphic design and misleading evidence appreciated Calvino – see http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/vitalstats
And an actual hotel was designed around Calvino’s city visions.
http://www.architectureweek.com/2004/0121/design_1-1.html