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Home - Floating University Stanford School of Engineering - Stanford Engineering Everywhere 502 - Hung Out to Dry: A Taxonomy of City Blocks | Strange Maps Kublai Khan had noticed that Marco Polo's cities resembled one another, as if the passage from one to another involved not a journey but a change of elements. In an urbanist twist to the Tales of the Thousand and One Nights, Polo the Venetian regales Khan the Mongolian with glimpses of some fabulous cities in the latter's huge empire. The stories, collected in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, oscillate between truth and fiction. Imagined cities built from the fragments of real ones: something similar is happening in Tout bien rangé, a cartography-based artwork by French artist Armelle Caron. The transformational process involved is threefold: the city on map A is deconstructed, its blocks are classified for size and shape, then reassembled in rows, arranged by type, on map B. In what the artist herself calls Anagrammes graphiques de plans de villes, Caron strips cities of their spatial context. The city is hung out to dry by its smallest constituent parts.