“Urban Fragments” was made after a proposal for my final undergraduate project for the School of Architecture and Urbanism in the University of Sao Paulo.

This work tried to create an interface that could communicate the feeling of imaginary, dream-like cities, combining video with a sense of space and 3D, building spacial forms with distortion, and ignoring formal perspective rules.

Fragments of video from Sao Paulo are used in the cities, creating structures that can be modified by the user, which allow multiple interpretation of the texts. I chose Italo Calvino´s text because as he said, he was fascinated about the complex symbol of the city because it allowed “more possibilities to express the tension of geometric rationality with the entangled human existences”.

The main purpose of this web site was to enrich the experience of the user with the city. I also believe that taking images from Sao Paulo and bringing them into a different context (using them to build these cities from the texts) can help the user to construct new ways of seeing Sao Paulo and create a more personal involvement with it. By the user´s interaction, different combinations of images, sounds and texts are made to question stereotypes and help him/her to experience the city as an eternal discovery.

The texts were taken from:

"The Invisible Cities", Italo Calvino: translated from the Italian by William Weaver. Harvest Book, Harcourt, Inc. San Diego, New York, London.

scripts for 3D structure based on:
Flash Studio (tutorial from Andries Odendaal), friend of Ed, UK, 2001
www.typospace.com - from Thomas Knoller

conception, images and production of website: Juliana Sato Yamashita

If you have questions or problems to view the site, please e-mail me at: jusy@uol.com.br