grid

 defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.

The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan's builders to develop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another. The Grid's two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.

is the quintessential form of modernity: of the mapping not of reality onto art or vice-versa but, the mapping of art onto art; form without content.

Rosalind Krauss identifies the Grid as the quintessential modernist preoccupation. She explains the abundance of the grid in modernist practice to demonstrate the mapping not of reality onto art or vice-versa but, the mapping of art onto art; form without content. It is the space where the aesthetic object and the physical object become one: ‘considered in this way, the bottom line of the grid is naked and determined materialism.’25

is the quintessential preoccupation in modernity: impervious to language, it makes the work of art purposeless, autonomous, and anti-referential in a way that denies narrativation and contemplation.

For her the grid promotes silence as a refusal of speech. Its visual mesh denies anything exterior any involvement in its contemplation. The grid is impervious to language, anti-referential and denies a narrativation of the seen. It is the artwork in its absolute purposelessness from which according to Krauss it gained its autonomy.

grid, n.Definitions

grid