Unit 23 is a yearlong graduate studio focusing on architectural form. A site was selected and documented through drawings. The site is the Textile Building (295 Fifth Ave.), and the drawings of this site dictate the direction of the architectural proposal.

The drawings of 295 Fifth Ave. direct the project towards the novel “Invisible Cities” written by Italo Calvino. The novel consists of nine chapters each consisting of five themes. Readers are invited to read the novel in any order, crafting their own narrative of the story.

Using the novel as a Literary Provocateur, this project centers on the narrative of Hidden Cities, where Calvino describes two contrasting cities, when they are actually one. In other words, the duality of a city.

Duality is thus extrapolated from Hidden Cities and used as the language for this project. Where one design decision is made, another decision must exist to either juxtapose or contradict it.