Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Food for thought

> 'Broadacre City' (1932-1958) by Frank Lloyd Wright was the antithesis of the city. It's 'organic' and decentralised organisation meant that it formed a continious sprawling landscape rather than the monumental, highly densified, rationally distributed 'Ville Contemporaine' (Le Corbusier).

> Yet a grid of any sort flies into the face of that idea. A grid in plan reminds us of a city because the idea of a modern city is a city built using a grid.

> Grids mean things are easily and equally devidable, buildable, leasable, stackable, shiftable, multiplyable and so on.

> A grid suggests repetition, a pattern. The city grid is something that is mirrored in less dense areas as well. Sprawling suburbs which follow the same typology establish a pattern, creating a grid.

> Patterns are found in nature yet from what I've seen they rarely take the shape of a grid.

> Grids also suggest division rather then inclusion. Grids are used to divide and sort things into their different types, uses, forms, colours or flavours.

> Grids are evil...

1 comment:

Andy Ferg said...

hello sir

your ramblings are interesting

more to the point, your picture? is that your work or is that from somewhere? and if so where? just coz they look cool