apr.
Off-Grid :
A Revolution for
Spatial Independence
The first step before emancipation is revolution. In design thinking, to emancipate oneself from a colonial mindset of spatial thinking, one must first be emancipated from and/or enact a revolution against this idea of the grid.
What is a grid? Well, according to Merriam-Webster, a grid is a network of uniformly spaced horizontal and perpendicular lines; something resembling a network.
A grid is a means of organization based on a series of uniformity. The organizational strategy creates a framework that creates a network, which determines the placement of things. All of these things in the network are points. The goal of much of my research for the past two years has been to find the means and methods of decoding the spatial grid that has been the template for so many American cities to understand hidden programmatic relationships left over from the early American colonial period.
In my opinion, the grid that has been so ingrained in the authorship of American spatial design is a single authoritarian act of violence that seems to have perpetuated itself for centuries. The author of this spatial grid, also happens to be one of my least favorite characters in history: Thomas Jefferson.
As much as I would love to rant directly about Jefferson as an entity, I will do my best to stay in the course of critique of his implementation of the grid rather than the critique of his character as a racist, sexual abuser that also happened to be the 3rd president and founding member of the United States.
Thomas Jefferson was a self-trained architect, among other titles, and is often recognized for his political achievements and advocacy for freedom and human rights. The issue with Jeffersonian human rights is that those rights require recognition of personhood. Jefferson himself was a slaveholder and the producer of many Black enslaved children by Sally Hemings, all of whom worked for him at his plantation home, Monticello. But again, this is about the grid, not the person.
As a design enthusiast, Jefferson took pride in the drawings for each of his projects. He was meticulous;
intentional with every line and legend. Monticello, for example, has been canonized as a marvel of section.
The plantation home was an autobiographical masterpiece for Jefferson. By design, the layout is extremely intentional in its organizational strategy to conceal:
Service quarters of the enslaved are always below ground when connected to the main house. These bodies were not to be perceived in space. Within binocular view of Monticello is the University of Virginia, where Jefferson built his Academical Village. Monticello and the Academical Village align perfectly because they have been placed within the grid to optimize visualization and surveillance.
The Academical village is a 200 ft wide open lawn set into three tiers and lined with deciduous trees. Two rows of interconnected buildings enclose the east and west sides, with the Rotunda library at the northernmost point. Behind each pavilion are broad spaces enclosed by serpentine brick walls. Each of these backyard-type spaces extends to additional one-room dwellings that are referenced as the East and West Ranges. The space behind the serpentine walls of each pavilion is coded as a garden in a plan or bird's-eye view. They feature a grid that is seemingly blocked off by an interior wall that has been lined with trees.
If you've ever taken a walk on the campus of UVA or even looked at a Google Earth image of it, you can see the aerial view of how these buildings have been organized; how certain areas within this grid have been isolated and left as privacy zones, even though their function is for service rather than privacy.
It is unlikely that Jefferson would have left these spaces blank by nature, due to his incredibly detailed design practice, but still, they remain empty spaces in his drawings. For Jefferson, the absence of notation is a clear indicator of the presence of undesirable but necessary points on the grid – put less politely, they are points in space that indicate the presence of a Black body and its labor in the network.
This racially driven method of organizing space has become so ingrained in our societal understanding of what and who should be seen and not seen in space. Jefferson's grid perpetuates this system and has been replicated time and time again without any critical thought on what the spatial layout is doing or not doing for those that move within it.
So, the next time you take a look at a place like Boston or Chicago and take note of the vast network of alleyways and side streets, think twice about what is being hidden from your purview and potentially why the labor of service has been so intentionally pushed to the back.
Written by Keren Dillard