The Impossible City

Stand in front of The Impossible City and your eyes will argue with themselves. It's a deeply carved wood wall relief — 12 to 18cm deep — cut so that parts of it seem to push forward toward you while other parts seem to sink back into the wall. Move a step and the whole thing reorganizes. It reads like a city that keeps rebuilding itself.

The depth and the descending-steps feeling come from Indian stepwells. These are wells reached by long flights of stairs going down into the earth, built to store water in the dry regions of Rajasthan and Gujarat. Chand Baori, in the village of Abhaneri, is one of the largest and deepest — it "consists of 3,500 narrow steps over 13 stories" and is about 30 m (100 ft) deep, built to fight water scarcity over a thousand years ago [Chand Baori, Wikipedia; IndiaFirst Life]. Seen from above, its criss-crossing stairs make a dizzying geometric pattern — the exact "which way is down" feeling this sculpture plays with. Rani ki Vav in Gujarat, an 11th-century stepwell built by Queen Udayamati, is the only stepwell that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site [CNN Travel].

Over that Indian depth sits Islamic geometry — specifically muqarnas, the honeycomb-like, three-dimensional niches that Islamic builders used inside domes and entrances. Muqarnas is an invention of Islamic architecture, using tiers of small niche-like cells projecting over one another [Muqarnas, Wikipedia]. It's often described as looking like honeycombs or stalactites, and it follows fractal, self-repeating geometry that creates "a sense of order, complexity, and harmony" [Cortex Architecture]. When natural light hits muqarnas, the little cells create a shifting play of light and shadow that makes solid stone feel like it's floating [World History Encyclopedia]. The Impossible City borrows that trick: light and depth doing something your brain can't fully resolve, which is the basis of optical and depth-illusion art.