What if Metropolis - Travelogue: Musia

The following is a description of the city that I am designing based on the art work of Wassily Kandinsky:

When you first see Musia on the horizon it can seem baffling to the eye. What you see many would describe as just an infant child’s drawing just as they start to understand the basic concepts of lines and shapes, but to the well-trained eye it is a city that is always thinking and moving with its people.

The residents of the city are just as happy to see a face they recognise as well as a new one, and if you are one of these new faces they will gladly show you around and tell you the tricks that you will need to know so that you can enjoy Musia to its fullest. These tricks mostly explain what you will expect to see if you go to a certain part of the city and what is the best way to get there so that you don’t become lost and overwhelmed by being in an unfamiliar city. It becomes quite clear that the reason of these word of mouth instructions is because the city has no signs or maps to guide you, only your mind, memory and what people tell you. You can try to draw and write your own guides and maps but you will soon find that Musia cannot be mapped out as when you look at an area one way and then look at it through another way you will find that it doesn’t match what you have put down on paper. I’ve tried this myself and it I must admit that at first I thought there was some magic spell at work keeping me from finding the city’s secrets.

I do have a word of caution to all new travellers planning to visit: do not be put off by the resident’s sudden eagerness to talk to you about how you see the city and what are your thoughts behind it as they only what to grow their understanding of how the outside world sees them. They are just a philosophical group of people that don’t just like to be given an answer and be done with it, they want to follow your trail of thought as you follow them through Musia.

It is no surprise as to why you may be asked this as Musia’s buildings are notably made up of curves, circles, squares and triangles and no two seems to be the same. Each of these odd shaped structures are covered in bright warm colours and patterns that make the city feel very out of place in its pale sandy terrain location. The patterns themselves seem to echo the shapes of the buildings they are painted on as if to communicate the role each building plays be it a school, a shop, a café or a family home but sadly the roles each building plays changes over the years and the true meanings of these patterns are lost to time and the history books, maybe this is the reason why Musia’s people ask you so must hoping that you will be the key that unlocks the code with the way you see the world.

Another notable feature of this city is the odd use of beams that connect some of the buildings together as well as to the streets below. These beams could not have been placed here for support as they not only range in size, from thin to thick, but also cut through the buildings themselves and even the rooms within them. Unlike the rest of the city these beams are solely painted in black which is quite a contrast considering that the rest of Musia is brightly coloured with reds, blues, yellows, greens and white and any other colour that falls in between them. The most plausible reason for this must be to help the eye make out the different buildings from one another as the black breaks up Musia’s rainbow. This use of black can also be found on the city streets but instead of being straight these walkways curve and bend between the buildings almost like a snake searching for its next meal.

If you do choose to visit the city, then I recommend that you stay from more than just one day as this will give you an opportunity to see Musia by night and I can ensure you that you will see a site unlike any other that you have seen before in any city that you have visited. For when the sun goes down and the city is covered in darkness do the citizens send up into the night sky strange hot air balloons that vary in size from one another. Attached to each of these balloons is a shape that echoes those used in the city’s buildings. Many people from outside the city believe that this is how Musia was designed and built, the inhabitants would send up the balloons with the shapes and let them drift freely around the skyline until the morning sun, to which they would bring them down again in the place they had drifted to and this would determine where a new building would be placed and what would be the first shapes used as its base. There is still the opportunity of seeing one or two of the balloons during the day but is only at night that you can see the true scale of the spectacle. 

All in all, Musia can be said to be a place of interpretation, mystery and confusion. Many who have visited do not say they have discovered Musia but instead have discovered the way in which their own mind works. There is also a theory, although I believe it to be more of a fact, that even though you can leave the city it never truly leaves you as if you were to stop for a few moments and take some timeout from your busy life you would still be able to hear the rhythm of the city. The faint sound of music twinkling in the air.