Wednesday, May 5, 2010

GRID


The general practise is that the grid is the essential underlying ordering system. In a city plan, the grid allows you to identify relationships between the city’s composite elements. The grid uncovers the form of the city as a geometric composition that is manageable and controllable and that makes sense. The grid flattens all elements including the landscape into a system that has orientation and measurement.

When the orthogonal grid is used as the starting point for organising and drawing space it is a democratic move because it calls for equal distribution – of space, of load and of weight. It’s a political move and proposes a system of efficiency which ultimately reflects the type of society that is foreseen to inhabit the city – one that is manageable to govern and is given boundaries to grow within. As a system of management, parts of the city grid will hence be zoned out and the development of each zone can then be monitored. The value of a point within the grid is then based on its relationship to other points within the grid. A hierarchy begins to grow between the parts that initially had equivalent value. If the grid is initially free of a hierarchy could it be said to be a tool of liberation? Or is it that when confronted with a site of no historical precedence, a vacuum, the grid is the only move that can be made?

Thomas Holme 1624-1695 : Pennsylvania

The grid that features in much of Superstudio’s speculations could be said to be an act to cancel out existing objects. Without objects, there would be no ownership, no point of time from which an object would come into existence so there would be release from a historical continuum. The new city that emerges comprises of the multiplication of the same component; a square from a grid that becomes a cube. The grid can deny objects but there is still a space that people move within so what comes to the forefront are the inhabitant’s actions. If the grid was the tool that could restart everything, then is the origin always in the form of the grid?

 Superstudio 1972 : Supersurface-Life

An alternative starting point for spatial organisation and city planning is the path. Australia contains an extensive system of Songlines – the method that enabled indigenous people to map the continent. A person could navigate the land by repeating the words of a song which described landmarks, important watering holes and landscape phenomena said to be traces from the creator-spirit. The path not only located sites for food and water but also became the visual form of a ritual – that which gives significance to a space that then becomes a place. In contrast to the grid as an organisational tool, a path gives space a sequential and hierarchical order and to follow a path is to re-enact a ritual.

However, in the contemporary city space, infrastructure is both the path’s visual form and the object that facilitates a civilisations survival needs. The differences between the types of ritual spaces that exist now within a city are aesthetic or tribal. A tribal path is that which is defined by an individual or a collective of individuals that, by re-enacting a ritual begin to define territories whose frontiers are not fixed or are defined by an alternative phenomena.

In terms of city planning, the overall benefit of the grid is that it activates a vacuum space or a site without context because it doesn’t need objects to do so. A path on the other hand needs reference markers or objects to call it into existence. Where are the vacuum spaces – sites without context located today and can a path undefined by objects be the starting point for its materialisation? And if the grid stands for a democratic move then what would be the social implications of this move?

Fionnuala Heidenreich May 2010

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