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Among my drawn projects, Impossible City 2 is probably the purest expression of my fascination with geometry, and my frustrations with perspective. The jumping-off point was a question I posed to myself -
Could a geometric basis be devised for a pattern that could repeat infinitely, while giving the appearance of a perspective view?
The drawing is my answer to that question, building a cityscape of vertiginous height and depth out of a grid of identical hexagonal tiles, each of which contains all the geometry required to compose the entire drawing.
Impossible City 2
The geometry of Impossible City 2
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Perspective in many respects directly replicates the way the eye sees - the system devised for this drawing does not. Perspective can depict real places, whereas any actual place would need to be rethought and changed to be inserted into this city.
My intent with this piece was not to depict the world as it is. The similarities to perspective are crucial in that they perform a similar role of triggering associations with vision, causing the viewer to experience the same sense of depth, scale, and volume. But this technique offers possibilities that perspective cannot, breaking away from a single point of view, enabling multiple focal points to be incorporated into the design, and thus creating new possibilities for storytelling.
A further key difference is that the tessellated elements can repeat infinitely - the illusion of depth is most convincing when the image is tightly cropped, whereas the pattern increasingly dominates as the view expands, revealing the artificiality of the structure beneath the recognisable elements of buildings and landscapes.
A physical, three-dimensional version of places drawn using this method could be built, but it would lack many of the elements required for people to occupy it: level floors, or consistency of large and small, and of up and down.
As such it has more in common with fairground fun houses, or the grotesquerie of the Parco dei Mostri at Bomarzo. Which brings us full circle: back to my childhood, as the gardens at Bomarzo were also a factor in my early education about the possibilities of representation. On our living room bookshelf was a large volume compiling the ‘Great Gardens of the World’, in which the tormented mannerist forms at Bomarzo, growing out of what looked like raw, unkempt nature, felt like a rebuke or an insult to the clipped order in the other chapters. The grainy black and white images haunted me - at once seductive and repulsive.
When I look back at the drawings I have created I see consistent themes, extending back to my earliest years - the need to impose a set of rules, and the playful urge to undermine and corrupt that order.
Pattern generation concept
Map of depth of repeating object
Pattern repeat option 1
Pattern repeat option 2
Below: Impossible City 2 - Blue Composition (click for full image)
The people inserted into architectural drawings tend to be generic in their nature - either vague, weightless ghosts that give scale to hand sketches, or the bland stock imagery (business man on phone etc.) used to populate final renderings.
I have always felt an urge to rebel against this, and saw in the multi-focal landscape of my Impossible City 2 an opportunity to try something different. Even though they are tiny - just a few pixels high - each figure in the city is different.
Some scenes capture everyday events that you might see on any given day, particularly in public spaces such as the park that separates the affluent upper levels from the poorer districts below. Here a man runs after his toddler daughter while, nearby, a woman pulls back her barking dog, which has been startled by a larger dog on the far side of the ornamental pond. Above, on the fire escape, a group of schoolboys hang out, trying to spit on the heads of passers-by below, while on the panoramic terrace a young man anxiously waits to introduce his boyfriend to his parents.
Other scenes highlight the differences between this city and our world, from the quartet playing on the bandstand, who comprise of an unusual combination of bassoon, flute, glockenspiel, and serpent, to the suburban neighbours locked in competition on their shared rooftop putting green, and all the way down to the strangely-attired outlaws who hide out on the lowest levels.
And finally, other scenes give glimpses of an overarching narrative, a bombastic melodrama of rival powerful families, a popular uprising against injustice, and the triumph of young love:
The villainous autocrat who rules the city dives into his swimming pool, watched by his machine gun-toting bodyguards, while in a nearby mansion a figure floats dead in the jacuzzi next to a giant bath toy duck, shot by a mystery assailant.
The daughter of the autocrat stands on the balcony of her palatial suite, looking down longingly on the city below that she cannot visit on the orders of her over-protective father.
And far down below in the tenements of the lower city, rebels hoist their flag on a washing line - the struggle for justice has begun!
Telling Stories
Explore the Impossible Cities
Impossible City 1
Impossible City 3
