While recent trends in architecture have focused on constructions seemingly absent of or ambiguously related to grids or regulating frameworks (what could be termed the aformal, informal, or formless), these organizational strategies have significant historical importance and continue to play a central role in defining formal relationships. While one approach seeks to collapse structure, the other sees it as both essential and generative. As a result, renewed discussion questioning the relative importance of the grid within the disciplines of art and architecture has emerged. One could understand the development of this discourse through the lens of two primary functions of the grid:
Grid as Drawing Device : Techniques of both parallel and perspective projection rely on the underlying logic of the grid to translate three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional plane. While parallel projection applies a grid comprised of horizontal, vertical, and oblique lines to describe spatial relationships, perspective projection (as seen in the 15th and 16th century treatises of Alberti, Dürer, or DaVinci) overlays lines converging to a central point or points onto a static, two-dimensional grid. The addition of these converging lines establishes a distinct viewpoint from which the space of the drawing is meant to be understood, thus presupposing a specific viewing subject and subjectivity. As a result the perspective grid, then, acts as an armature within which a real, material, and often anthropocentric view of space can be depicted. For Rosalind Krauss, this distinction is an important step in understanding the conceptual difference in the way the grid functions relative to parallel versus perspective projection and perhaps serves as a key to understanding the resurgence of orthographic drawing in contemporary architectural representation. With orthographic drawing comes a graphic flatness and an abstraction of the “real” three-dimensional space it meant to represent, providing opportunities for re-reading and misreading the drawing as the singular, subject-dependent point of view is negated.
Grid as Organizational Device : Fundamental to understanding the centrality of the grid in art and architecture is its function as a tool for organizing and orchestrating spatial relationships. Within this the grid acts as an ideal, more a conceptual framework to play form against than a physical structure. It is in this role that Krauss claims the grid predominated and in many ways defined art produced during the 20th century. What it allowed for was the ability to focus on pure relationships between abstract elements, freed from the constraints of the natural, real, or material. John Hejduk’s nine-square grid problem relies on the grid in precisely this way, acting as a framework within which spatial figures emerge as aggregations of columns or walls (conceived of as abstract or immaterial) form corner, center, or edge conditions. Such compositional strategies continued to proliferate through the advent of digital design technologies, the geometric control of the grid embedded within the coordinate-based systems of modeling software. That being said, novel spatial strategies have begun to emerge as a reaction to and skepticism of the control and precision enabled by the computer.
On the one hand the grid has remained, revisited as a historical and organizational structure or projective device (Bureau Spectacular’s organized artifacts unified through an underlying grid or Elena Manferdini’s building portraits studying the Miesian curtain wall). The popularity of projects like Supra Order and Cryptic.K, aggregators of the grid-adjacent, seems to suggest the interest is here to stay. Yet on the other the rigidity, rational, and geometric logic of the grid has been eschewed, replaced with a material logic of stacks, droops, wiggles, or piles. It is matter that determines spatial or structural relationships, distinctly non-compositional, non-hierarchical, and absent of a gridded logic. Far from a binary condition, these seemingly contradictory approaches to the grid have the potential to yield far more potent results when deployed simultaneously. Current trends in contemporary art may support just that sentiment, with artists such as Avery Singer, Tauba Auerbach, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Sascha Braunig leveraging digital tools to explore the relationship between the real and abstract, the material and the immaterial. When viewed through an architectural lens, the work of these artists could provide new methodlogies for deploying the grid as a generative device in design.