Can You Tell a City By Its Blocks?

What if city blocks could be extracted, isolated, stripped of all but their essential form, and lined up like soldiers for inspection? Would we know Paris or Berlin by the sum of their parts?

French artist Armelle Caron has satisfied this curiosity in "Tout bien rangé," an assembly of what Caron calls "graphic anagrams" of well-known cities. The series, whose title translates roughly as "All in order," is composed of digital images of cities printed on canvas -- cities whole and cities disassembled, catalogs of parts for some Borgesian Ikea project.