For our final Arch 199 project, we designed the city of Octavia, a fictional place imagined by Italo Calvino in his text Invisible Cities. This city is described as “the spider-web city” and is held up solely by ropes and chains between two mountains. All buildings hang below the support system. Those who live in Octavia cannot be certain of their fate from day to day because, as Calvino points out, “they know the net will only last so long” (Calvino, 75). We took these ideas and transformed the fictional place into a real structure with a twist: the whole thing was made out of candy.
Using Lifesavers, Twizzlers, Fruit Roll-Ups, Starburst, Gummy Bears, dental floss, Hershey’s Kisses, and some rope, we created Octavia on a scale that spanned the size of a room. Below our city, marshmallow clouds rested upon a bedsheet that represented the void into which the city would inevitably fall. There were three main support ropes, with floss, Twizzlers, and Fruit Roll-Ups creating the rest of the spider web. Everything else hung from these supports, with nothing rising up.
Our construction of our masterpiece was most definitely on the fly, but it turned out much better than we initially thought. Our original idea was to have a dozen or so skewers with a pineapple on each side with some fruit on the skewers and some rock candy hanging as well; we were quickly told that this was too small scale and we had to shoot for the stars! When we finally secured our exhibition locale, the famous “Eagle’s Nest” room in Temple Hoyne Buell Hall, we really took a big step forward. We constructed the city in phases and different waves of volunteers. The structure went up Sunday, the houses and city elements early Monday, the clouds below on Monday night, and the great finishing touches before the unveiling on Tuesday.
With candy, we tried to recreate a lot of the elements from the description, keeping the principle that everything ‘hung below’ instead of rising. So our city, concentrated at the centre with clusters of ‘ground-scrapers and houses’ hung below. We also included elements such as people who inhabited the city. Ultimately ,we were able to create an edible model of a city that the inhabitants know will last so long, by making it out of substances that we wanted our audience to interact with and tear down.
This project provided an interesting experience, particularly with our choice of city, as it required us to pour all the knowledge we had accumulated over the course of the semester into a delicious model. I’ll be the first to admit that I swiped a few starbursts and hershey kisses during the construction phase, but it was, nonetheless, an engaging project to have to assemble a city based solely upon a one page description provided by Italo Calvino. Some features were deliberate and some features were unintended, but in the end I think we did a bang up job assembling Octavia for the class, not to mention it was incredibly delicious.
Creating an edible model of Octavia definitely turned out tougher in the end that I originally thought it would be. What seemed to be a simple design in the beginning led to multiple iterations before we could finally put all the pieces together. Although we wanted to make the model completely edible, we found that that would be next to impossible on the scale we were given, spanning the Eagle’s Nest. We needed to include a few non edible supports that would help steady the project until the Giants came and tore down the city. As we could see first hand, no one was ever sure when the city would be no more.
