If you want to read a book about cities, you still can’t do much better than a slim, plotless work of fiction by Italo Calvino wherein the explorer Marco Polo tells the emperor Kublai Khan of what he’s seen in his travels across the world. Originally published in Italian in 1972, Invisible Cities has inspired generations of readers, hailing from all across the world themselves, to think in entirely new ways not just about cities but about travel, place, perception, reality, myth, and literature itself. Though very much a work concerned with what’s seen only in the imagination, the book has also inspired artists to try their hand at rendering the 55 fictitious cities Polo describes within.Ī few years ago we featured “ Seeing Calvino,” a joint effort by artists Matt Kish, Leighton Connor, Joe Kuth to illustrate, among other elements of the Calvino canon, each and every one of Invisible Cities‘ fantastical, often impossible collections of structures, lives, and, ideas. More recently, the Peru-based architect and artist Karina Puente has, with her Invisible Cities Project, put herself to work on a similar endeavor. Each of Puente’s intricate renderings takes about a week to produce, and as she tells Archdaily, “they are not only drawn – I use different types of paper and draw on each one before cutting them out with exacto knives.
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