VESTİGİA

Vestigia is a latin word which means traces and remnants. Vestigia is a speculative city inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities Zaira, where memory is not merely preserved but actively transformed into spatial form. The project is structured around Memorax, a creature that searches for and collects memories, translating them into architecture. The city is organized along a vertical axis composed of two platforms, emphasizing the cyclical flow-road remembering and forgetting. The upper platform contains the memory blocks, where memories are first gathered. These structures gradually transform from open to closed forms, shifting geometrically from rectangular prisms to cubes, parallelograms, and finally triangles. This formal contraction reflects the compression of memories as they are collected, sorted, and distilled. From this final triangular form, an elevator-like structure connects to the lower platform, marking the transition from abstract memory to lived space. The lower platform represents the city generated by Memorax. Here, the geometric sequence expands in reverse, evolving from triangles to parallelograms, squares, and rectangular prisms. This expansion symbolizes memories grounding themselves into urban life and becoming the foundation of the city. Repetition with variation is used to establish a shared architectural language, while the inverted pyramid above and the upright pyramid below form an hourglass-like composition, representing the continuous flow of time and memory. This is also why they stay in same vertical direction. From the perspective of a user, daily life in Vestigia feels suspended between past and present. Walking beneath the structures, one senses the city growing downward like roots, as buildings extend fluidly toward the ground. The circular void on the lower platform serves as a reminder that the city is never complete; it is constantly reshaped by new memories. In Vestigia, inhabiting the city means inhabiting memory itself fluid, evolving, and always in motion.