ABSTRACT
Since the ancient Egyptians, architects have used the grid as an aid to design. A grid helps an architect make decisions about positions, dimensions, alignments. A grid can act as a conceptual bridge between the geometry of making and ideal geometry. A grid’s power to instil architecture with an integrity blending ideal geometry with the geometry of making was no less in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It played its part in Beaux Arts Classicism and in its nemesis, Modernism. In the twenty-first century, three-dimensional spatial grids have come to play an essential role in computer-generated architecture too. Conceptually, the lines that define the edges of geometric figures have no thickness. But the elements of buildings do. Grids can be used in planning cities and organising landscape too. Descartes suggested people can make sense of our complex world by overlaying it with a conceptual grid.
