From grids to grid effects

Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay ‘Grids’ (1978) explores the space produced by the use of the grid in the visual arts by the modern avant‐gardes. Disconnected from perspective and from its construction of correspondences between the physical world (as object of the representation) and its image, this grid produces a space that is abstract in the sense of both removed and autonomous from material reality. Formal experimentation can occur in this space. But what occurs here is also an experimentation on the materiality of the drawing and the painting that produces (rather than represents) itself. Krauss’ argument is relevant in a reconsideration of the use of the grid in architectural, urban and territorial systems, because it offers a reading of the grid beyond the figurative and the descriptive, proposing it not as a form or as a device for representation but as an agent of the making of space. The lecture concentrates on the operations of the grid – the ‘grid effect’ ‐ when it is employed as an organizing system in architecture and the urban space. When the abstract and geometrical space of the grid impacts on the physical world its effects have direct material implications. Territorial and urban grids, plotted on the accidents of the land, produce a complexity of physical and spatial effects. Here the grid does not construct (produce) or represent (describe) space, but interacts in a supple and adaptable way with the physical conditions of its context. The lecture explores the impacts and implications of the physical grid – from the geopolitical malleability of the Roman territorial grid, to the ‘blindness’ of other colonial grids, to the weakness of the Modernist grid, to the fractures (‘ladders’) and the warping of contemporary post‐urban grids