Grids and Beauty Ryan Lawber ARCH 503 5/14/08
Abstract The grid is purely a creation of man’s intent of an organizational structure. Square, triangular, hexagonal, and other grid forms have been utilized in the overall design of cities to the design of the most minute of objects, including the complex circuitry of modern technology. However, from their unnatural, restrictive regularity, grids have developed into an aesthetic tool. This paper will analyze these grids in relation the question of “what is beauty?” More specifically, what defines beauty in nature and what aspects of this are seen in the artificial gridded forms?
Grids Rosalind Krauss writes of two types of functions that emerge from grids: spatial and temporal. Spatially, grids extract an identity within the grid itself and anything it might overlay, creating a flat, “geometricized,” field. Krauss states of a general grid: “…it is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its back to nature. In the flatness that results from its coordinates, the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral result not of imitation, but of aesthetic decree. Insofar as its order is that of pure relationship, the grid is a way of abrogating the claims of natural objects to have an order particular to themselves; the relationships in the aesthetic field are shown by the grid to be in a world apart and, with respect to natural objects, to be both prior and final."
The spatial character of grids is a complete exclusion of natural systems. Temporally, grids have become a symbol of the antimimetic modernity, and have become “emblematic” of modern art and architecture, with the power that these grids are capable of creating. Grids have the potential to “mask and to reveal [shame] at the same time. (Krauss 12)” Spatially, the grid tells no story, but temporally, it may unintentionally reveal a structure. Even if the grid is not architectural, vertical lines can be perceived as posts, horizontal lines as lintels. As Krauss indicates, there is an underlying (inadvertent) symbol that can sometimes be found within these grids, and is subject to the screen of the human eye. As Krauss shows, with a nine square grid, filling in the center column and center row will display a Greek cross, and suffer/benefit from the unintentional meaning related to this (Krauss, 10). Similarly, filling in alternating squares on an 8 by 8 grid illustrates a chess board and will, in our minds, expand from the meanings derived from this contextually. Mentioned above, the artificial grids, encompassing the typical Cartesian, triangular and radial grids, are purely a realization of man. These grids have no relation to nature (perhaps opposing nature), and have the sole purpose of being functional, being that they are prescribed only as a form of restrictive organization. If a grid is abstracted in any way before applying information, the grid is not a grid, but rather an application of overlaid lines intersecting, but applying or delineating no usable information. However, if the grid is manipulated after information has been