THE GRID: A Serial Exploration

This first post is actually part of an essay I wrote for my Masters. I decided to use it primarily to break that inertia of having to compose some text from scratch and because it forms a major thread of interest that has preoccupied me since first learning and researching the urban realm, namely the relationship between the city, politics and economics. 

I will preface each section of the essay 'THE GRID' and aim to submit a section every week. This first post is a bumper issue that'll introduce the project followed immediately by the first section of the essay. 

PREFACE

I had been cycling for over an hour. It was late afternoon and the sun was more an irritant than a joy. The hum of rubber on the uniform asphalt was beginning to grate on my nerves and yet I was still no closer to answering, where was I? 

Hoggan Crescent apparently, but really I could have been anywhere in Dunfermline, or indeed anywhere in the country. The sense of déjà vu was palpable as I whirred past monotonous rows of two-storey detached and semi-detached boxes. 

Each window carefully provided a consistent level of dinginess and banality. Each street regurgitated the endless variations on road, pavement, grass, doorstep. Identity was only perceived in the type of detritus in the front garden and whether the render was white or beige. 

Nothing determined how deep I was into this labyrinth or suggested an escape. My stupor was interrupted by a familiar appendix of green. This vestigial strip of grass had been labelled Rex Park and offered to the settlement as recompense for the ubiquitous sea of tarmac and crazy paving. Wonderful, except this is where I had started.

My venture into the Dunfermline’s suburban tumour had been defined by boredom and frustration. This was DEX, a vast dormitory where Edinburgh’s commuters could switch off after work. Childhood memories of Leeds floated back with the setting sun. Except my suburb had nicer trees, but really that is where the distinction ends. 

INTRODUCTION

This is an investigation into the reasons behind architectural problems created by the conditions of suburbia. Any new suburban settlement must respond to the issues of homogeneity and identity that create the environment described in the preface. A response must start by understanding the motives behind these issues; it must question the priorities at work and the agency that created recent suburban conditions. 

In the 21st Century connectivity is pervasive. We are becoming increasingly interdependent to manage the growing complexities of our civilisation. This dissolves the boundaries demarcating various human activities and requires us to be evermore intellectually, professionally and culturally omnivorous (Di Battista 2015). We must understand and formulate responses to contemporary problems relative to all the forces that condition them. This text is predicated on the argument that contemporary architectural problems cannot be viewed in isolation. The remit must expand and architecture here is treated as a type of logic, to apply to traditionally extraneous topics. This cognitive language can translate that vast repository of cultural information, the city, into terms specifically relevant to creating a successful architectural response to the situation.

The thesis centres on the creation of a masterplan. A forensic text, it explores the historical relationship between planning and economics to explain their contemporary relationship, using the urban plan to frame discussion in architectural terms. Comparisons between drawn and built forms allow for analysis pertinent to the task of designing this masterplan. The focus of these readings is how the urban device of the grid is used architecturally to manifest a social, political or economic agenda at salient points in history.