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La fi\u00e8vre d’Urbicande<\/em> (1985) by Fran\u00e7ois Schuiten and Beno\u00eet Peeters is the second volume in the Cit\u00e9s Obscures<\/em> series. This was the story that captured my attention the most when I first saw it. The book opens with a foreword by the central character, Robick, chief architect of the city of Urbicande, in which he discusses his plans to unify the city’s separate halves by extending the design of the city’s southern half into the chaotic northern section.<\/p>\n Urbicande is built on the steeply-sloped banks of a wide river. The rational, rectilinear southern bank is exposed to the sun while the northern bank is a place of shadow and mists; traffic between the two halves is strictly controlled by the administrators of the south who fear the chaos the north represents. The style of the southern region is a superb imagining of an Art Deco metropolis, the physical and psychological opposite of the north bank which is revealed as an older place of winding lanes and dishevelled buildings. In Robick’s foreword he refers to former “masters” who happen to be people from our world: architect \u00c9tienne-Louis Boull\u00e9e and architectural renderer and theorist Hugh Ferriss<\/a>. Mention of Ferriss was a surprise since he isn’t so well-known outside the architectural sphere. I’ve previously discussed his Metropolis of Tomorrow<\/em> which is an evident influence in the style of some of Schuiten’s skyscrapers.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Urbicande is thrown into turmoil and near-anarchy when a small cube of some unknown material excavated in the desert is left in Robick’s office and begins to unaccountably grow, shooting out buds which form replicas of itself. The substance is invulnerable yet also passes through material objects with ease, and an evolving mesh of structure (given the name “The Network”) is soon growing out of Robick’s home and into the city.<\/p>\n When the Network eventually reaches the northern bank of the river it leads to a meeting between the separated zones although not quite in the manner the architect intended. The two halves of the city are symbolic, of course, and the mind\/body, rational\/irrational divide is mirrored in the relationship between Robick and his brothel madame neighbour, Sophie. The use of a fantastic device to explore issues of character or morality is a common one in written fiction but less so in comic stories. Schuiten and Peeters’ fictions are closer to those of Borges (whose Tl\u00f6n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius<\/em> is cited as an influence) and Calvino than the tradition of fantastic adventure stories.<\/p>\n The burgeoning growth of the Network is one of the more fascinating creations from Schuiten and Peeters, and its presence recurs from time-to-time in the Obscure World. If there can be one Network, there may be others, and one of these manifests in the middle of Brasilia in an epilogue to the original story drawn some years later. An older Robick has found his way to the Brazilian capital and the appearance there of the Network seems to imply a connection with the architect.<\/p>\n L’archiviste.<\/em><\/p>\n The mysterious growth is also seen in another book, L’archiviste<\/em> (1987), a beautiful collection of large plates showing different views of the Obscure World. Schuiten here manages to work a variation on Arnold B\u00f6cklin’s Isle of the Dead<\/em><\/a>; regular {feuilleton} readers will perhaps appreciate why I like this work as much as I do.<\/p>\n A further appearance is in another single piece which Tuxedomoon member Peter Principle used on the cover of his 1985 album Sedimental Journey<\/em>. That album appeared on the Crammed Discs label which fittingly is based in Brussels. The encyclopedic Obsk\u00fcr<\/a> site lists other notable sightings:<\/p>\n We know that part of the structure rose from the wave during the great equinoctial tide not far from the SODROVNI Cape, and it was also seen in ROTH and at the GREEN LAKE, as well as in the SEPTENTRIONAL and POZNAH Jungles, not to mention CHULA VISTA, the IVALO volcanic chain and the MARAHUACA Plateau.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I’ll end this by wondering whether MC Escher’s Cubic Space Division<\/em> (1952) was an influence on this story. Escher had architectural interests of his own, of course, and his inventions have been borrowed by a variety of artists for many years. This is one of his more abstract works yet it sparks the imagination by seeming to be an illustration of something. Schuiten avoids Escher’s paradoxes but we’ve seen enough influences from elsewhere to make it a possibility.<\/p>\n Elsewhere on { feuilleton } Previously on { feuilleton } La fi\u00e8vre d’Urbicande (1985) by Fran\u00e7ois Schuiten and Beno\u00eet Peeters is the second volume in the Cit\u00e9s Obscures series. This was the story that captured my attention the most when I first saw it. The book opens with a foreword by the central character, Robick, chief architect of the city of Urbicande, in which he … Continue reading “La fi\u00e8vre d’Urbicande by Schuiten & Peeters”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8,2,42,51,9,4,21,48,3],"tags":[267,277,712,6169,710,398,216,349,714,1663,1611],"class_list":["post-6079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-art","category-books","category-cities","category-comics","category-design","category-fantasy","category-illustrators","category-music","tag-arnold-bocklin","tag-art-deco","tag-benoit-peeters","tag-crammed-discs","tag-francois-schuiten","tag-hugh-ferriss","tag-mc-escher","tag-paul-delvaux","tag-peter-principle","tag-raoul-servais","tag-tuxedomoon"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-1A3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6079\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"urbicande2.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/09\/urbicande2.jpg\")
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\n\u2022 The fantastic art archive<\/a><\/p>\n
\n\u2022 Les Murailles de Samaris by Schuiten & Peeters<\/a>
\n\u2022 The art of Fran\u00e7ois Schuiten<\/a>
\n\u2022 Carlo Scarpa\u2019s Brion-Vega Cemetery<\/a>
\n\u2022 Hugh Ferriss and The Metropolis of Tomorrow<\/a>
\n\u2022 Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux<\/a>
\n\u2022 Arnold B\u00f6cklin and The Isle of the Dead<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"