Coordinates

The Possibility of a Non Absolute Grid

 

Organization has a close bond with the concept of pattern, it attempts to explain how patterns can arise uniquely through internal controls, and how these controls sustain themselves taking on a direction assuming the appearance of autonomy. The concept of organization targets the emergence of the succeeding events as the origin of developmental process and formal stability.

 

Whether serving a merely functional mean, or an expressive formal objective, in one-way or another, we have always believed that architecture main task is that of organizing. Space, form, program, symbols, pixels, points, cities, material, lines, and ideas are some of the things that Architects have often structured and communicate through one of the discipline’s most prominent and prolific devices. By manipulating its scale, proportion and frequency, the use of The Grid has become an instrumental approach to the physical, conceptual, technical and spatial aspects of design. Used to overcome “the meaningless”, without a doubt and regardless of the position we might hold today around The Grid, we can all agree that its organizational qualities have widely spread symbolic and methodological value across the discipline.

 

However, applications and refutations of this influential device have been largely constrained by the iconographic place held by a single geometrical arrangement that follows form The Cartesian Coordinate System often visualized as spreading in to an infinite plane. This myopia (maiopia) has left The Grid resting on a well-established bipolar cliché. Representing, in one hand, a reductive homogenous outdated system unable to provide enough variation for the needs of an ever-changing complex society, and in the other, a synthetic ultimate form of mythical proportions that conveys the search for disciplinary autonomy, reducing, in both cases, its potentials to an axiomatic formalization practice.

 

Today I would like to reinsert in to the architectural debate The Possibilities of a Non-Absolute Understanding of the Grid. and try to outline an alternative vision that moves from the standard geometrical description in to a multifaceted platform which main focus is that of information. My interest comes from the actual circumstances inside architectural design practices but it also comes very much from a long time fascination with architectures capacity to produce narratives able to articulate external circumstances.

 

To this matter, the Cartesian deformation method applied to describe the transformations of natural form in response to environmental forces done by morphologist D’Arcy Thompson in 1917 gives us important suggestions. In the last chapter of his thesis “On Growth and Form”, a set of rectilinear coordinates where projected on different organisms and then distorted to established possible relations. Thompson provisionally aligned bodies and measure in such a way that particular dissymmetry and disproportions were maintained as events within a deformable, flexible, and irreducible geometric description system. From his perspective, the application of geometry was no longer consider an immobile measure of invariant and unitary characteristics but a place upon which differential transformations occurred. By combining empirical observations and basic geometrical principles on conformal transformation, Thompson was able to trace the process of how information flowed between the body and the external otherness, arguably extending the rhetorical properties of The Grid in to new narratives by making geometry more compatible to the realities of the described object.

 

Architectures interest on Thompson´s synthesis relies on the understanding of geometry as a sensibility continuously internalizing external events. With an escalating ambition to manage and represent environmental forces, in the last decades architects have turned to relational models deployed in digital environments to position a range of time based flexible design strategies that integrate information into geometrical procedures. Although the techniques remain largely experimental and marginal in their application; the use of animation, parametric, and more recently the use of simulation software has allowed designers to incorporate in unprecedented ways external parameters in to their analytical skills and design palates.

Instead of resisting chaotic streams a new kind of architectural practices uses environmental information to capture, adjust, blend, and weave “vortexes of data”. Supported by a growing capacity of software to simulate external information, architects no longer seek new styles or compositional methods in response  to fluctuating medium, but numeric figures, diagrams and statistics, making the use of The Grid look as a routine practice of apparent insufficient capacities.  

 

Seen form an other angle and looking in to the way these new tools compute the information they claim to manage, I state that the introduction of algorithmic procedures as design tools has triggered the mastery of The Grid, That the power of these techniques to navigate across scale and articulate geometries has been a determine factor to uncover the interrelation between Grids (alpha numeric, convergent, hybrid, geodesic, fractal, Voronoy, radial, polar, structured and unstructured, to name a few, long forgotten or just overlooked under the iconographic place held by their rectangular cousin and our incapacity to fully articulate them.

 

It is also true that despite the claims by a growing sector in the discipline, that The Grid has no capacity to translate the vectorial representation of the environment in to convoluted forms of extreme geometrical complexity, the truth is that since the emergence of CAD technologies in the 60´s to todays parametric modelling technics, the structure of most of the modelling software use in todays architectural practices, has remain Cartesian, and with it, the uneasy question of The grid as an the ultimate organizational device.

 

I would like to extend an invitation to rethink architecture as a relational reality, where perhaps and just perhaps, The Grid far from vanishing has suffered a profound refinement.