A project with Yiyang Liang
Sculpting Data into Everyday Objects | ITP | Instructor: Esther Cheung
Technologies: Python, NLTK, Rhino-python, Rhinoceros, 3D printing
Invisible Cities: Sculpting Text into Imaginary Cities
Celebrating Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”, our project sculpts the words of “City and the Sky 1-5” into a generative fragment of Upper East Manhattan, re-imagining 69 blocks of the city.
In order to do this we assigned six different urban typologies to six word categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc). The building typologies are distributed following the occurrence of the words in Calvino’s text.
In the following slide, you can see the ‘government building type’, a building typology that represents the occurrence of one of the five cities in Calvino’s text-Eudoxia, Beersheba, Thekla, Perinthia, and Andria.
Each block contains sixteen lots, each of one containing one ‘building structure’. 
3D Model Design Process
A render during the design process, showing the different building types before assembling the model.
A previous iteration generated by an algorithm that places buildings based on the frequency of appearance of the first two letters of each word in the text.
