THE GRID: INSTALLATION FOR NEUE ARTISANS 4.0
Neue Artisans is founded by BandLab: Bureau of Architecture and Design, and organised together with a collective of design enthusiasts. The initiative was to organise a design showcase in support of the ever-developing local design industry, seeking to explore improved/new techniques, experiments on possibilities and components in design, art and architecture. We encounter a pool of emerging talents here in Malaysia and the region. Neue Artisans brings together this network, and is becoming a kind of design-trade show for emerging design-makers.
For Neue Artisans 4.0, Normal Architecture together with Studio Karya were commissioned to carry out the installation under the theme ‘Technique’. Our installation took on the form of The Grid
9 POINTS ON THE GRID
• “In the spatial sense, the grid states the autonomy of the realm of art. Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature.”1 • The grid is not new, nor is it in anyway an original invention or idea. Architecture does not need to be in pursuit of the new all the time. • Any attempt to make the same grid will inevitably yield certain degrees of differences. The grid is always the same, but somehow always different. • The grid is anti iconic; it is an attempt to make architecture which is invisible, not in terms of being transparent, but rather by being a background for other things. However, the grid could also be monumental, which is different from iconic. • The grid as a construction becomes a technique to measure and frame space and events. It presents itself as a sampling and indexing device. • The grid is not formally complex, yet its apparent neutrality allows it to frame complexity. It is pointless to respond to complexity with more complexity. • The neutrality of the grid and the fact that it is an author-less, pre-existing instrument, makes it is the ideal technique for the collaboration between two practices. Without realising it, both of our practices have been fascinated by the grid. For different reasons, perhaps. • The biggest challenge in working with the grid was the discipline to stop ourselves from trying to ‘design’, beyond what is already there to be appropriated. • For us, the grid somehow addresses both the idea of limits and possibilities in architecture; both are equally fascinating and perhaps not so mutually exclusive?
1.Rosalind Kraus, “Grids” in October, Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979), pp. 50-64.
