This project explores the city of Raissa, one of the many fictional cities described in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities — a book that uses poetic prose to describe imagined metropolises through the lens of human experience, memory, and emotion.

Raissa is described as a city of sadness, yet Calvino writes:

“...at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.”

Through a series of physical study models, this project investigates how architecture can embody emotional duality — in this case, the quiet coexistence of grief and beauty, emptiness and form, loss and presence. The models became emotional landscapes rather than literal ones, relying on materiality, light, shadow, and spatial tension to express the fragile balance between sorrow and joy.

Each model represents a vignette — a fragment of Raissa’s identity — capturing moments where joy presses up against grief, or where structure holds both burden and hope.

The work functions as both architectural exploration and emotional cartography — asking how we might design spaces that do not fix emotions but hold their contradictions.

The materials were intentionally minimal: foam, chipboard, and paper — used in ways that expose tension, absence, softness, and rupture. This process was as much about listening to the materials as arranging them.