Thinking about the Cartesian grid and formal alignment

 The Cartesian Grid is a well-established "design tool" that architects have religiously used. In the article "Nonlinear Perspective," Kiel Moe(1) suggests below that there could be a way of thinking about design using other frames of references, in order to begin to allow tolerance and incorporation of environmental and political concerns in design methods:

"When you only design in a Cartesian frame of reference, architecture falsely appears as an object with apparent properties of simple location, seemingly more autonomous than it is in reality"

This is an interesting proposal, since it first questions whether certain types of spatial concerns do not exist in a Cartesian location to begin with. For the sake of experimentation, I attempted a short design project with the assumption that trees were an ecology that do not operate under a Cartesian frame of reference, to which my feedback was that the project surrounding it still demonstrated strong properties of Cartesian design. This had a lot to do with the lack of rigor in design decisions, but also made me question what are the degrees and properties of "Cartesian-ness" in academic design in the US.

Two of my undergraduate studios dealt heavily with ideas of alignment and misalignment in design. One studio was an analysis and exploration of designing with phenomenal transparency, while the other was designing a project about the creation of a "third space," a third spatial condition created through the intersection of two formally defined spaces. Both are references to canonical ideas in the pedagogy of design- formal ideas that become legible through reading order in space.

However, after my undergraduate education, I became a lot more disillusioned with the use of formal readings of space. For a variety of practical concerns, I could not prioritize formal order as taking priority over other concerns, which then made me even less concerned with prioritizing it on an abstract level. Also bringing back why the Cartesian grid matters in this line of thought, the practical implications are follows:

-  As professional designers, we should be working with construction lines ie. grids when designing space

- These grids should be set up with an understanding of structural grids, even if it a fully wall-supported structure, for basic communication, coordination, and developing an understanding of buildability/gravity in the project.

- These grids however do not naturally align in visual ways that phenomenal transparency or third space does. These can only be solved in addition with questions of detail, as there is an offset of surface thickness depending on detail. 

-The design of the detail becomes a study and backtracking process of its own, one which masters of detail become highly accustomed to and not necessarily as an understanding of visual representation.

-The practicality and ability to prioritize grid alignments is then a problem on multiple scales to solve, which often becomes a costly structural decoration which needs substantial justification and problem-solving labor. 

Currently with the magnitude and multitude of problems we are solving for, aesthetic alignment as a design tool may be an artefact that we can work with, but often times may not be serving the community in the best ways. In addition, with digital tools that allow us to easily approximate and translate design that is not initiated from a Cartesian grid, the grid could actually be more of a secondary thought to design thinking. It is not organic form-making is not what is being proposed, but rather a more loose approach that allows us to move away from the grid. Alas, how often are we given perfectly rectilinear site boundaries, or topography that can be fully mapped out as a solid surface? Can we be precise, yet allow for the distortions of reality to soften up our understanding of the Cartesian grid?

1. Log, Fall 2019, No. 47, Overcoming Carbon Form (Fall 2019) pp118-130