

​INDIVIDUAL WORK
​City of tears

Yongyan Jin
15 / 08 / 2020
Last week, we were asked to read a short story and reinterpret the library which it describes in their own design proposals.
For Task 8 we will be taking this one step further. This time we will be asked to write a short story of their own, as well as design the architecture that goes with it. The story that we create will take the form of a 200 word ‘micro-fiction’, a style of very short fiction which is demonstrated in Italo Calvino’s 1972 book Invisible Cities. In this famous book of short stories, Calvino described hundreds of imaginary cities, usually in stories so brief that they only take up one page. Student’s will be required to read an excerpt from this book and emulate its style of imaginative story telling.
​City of tears
That is a story has been told for a long time by the people live on the ground. Here is a large and tall castle in the ground under one big lake. One day, groups of people digged tunnel under the ground and discovered this subterranean void. They find that the building is connected by lots of bridges with beautiful glasses and delicate gothic style pillars. Like the whole building is the crossroads of the underground world. They walked on one of these bridges that located in the middle of the building. When they were walking, the whole building is really quiet but just the sounds of raindrops that hit the glass. When they followed the sound and looked outside the window, here was raindrops everywhere with faint blue light seems like the raindrops absorb the mineral in the ground. It looked like the entire building is crying. When they walked into the building, they did not find even one person but a considerable number of books lying on the ground. When they clean a path from the book hill. They did not find the stairs to go down or up the floors. Finally, they find one handle on the ‘elevator’ but controlled by the chains. They move the handle and took the elevator to discover the castle and enjoy the rain scene from the huge french window. And then they went to the huge library with spiral walkway, the gallery, the courtyard, the private library with gorgeous iron arches, the room in the caves, and the planetarium. It took them like thousands of years to get back to the ground, when they bring reporters and hundreds of people to went back to the library, they find there just stones and muds at the end of the tunnel.


Section

Dome details

Table details

Elevators details

Resting room views