Jack H. Williamson The Grid: History, Use, and Meaning NEXT “Tisai pero be nr ta ‘The grt has played «central role inthe development and conscli- ets fond Symrsiam es ce dasion of the modem movement in twentieth-centary graphic {mesure af Tehmigy, Apri two, design. Due to its ostensible use during this period as a composi- ‘tule-Tielemaoe sein Gi Pat ional design matric for controlling the placement ofrypography and Prt Ut ine NewnreTget and imagery, the modemist grid was present in the finished ‘Ghaaarnag ote.” design. Consequently, its symbolic aspect is not generally recog- ty Heeddoeianspoprintsyamet ized oF ven suspected. Though equally obacure in Significance, SSclnwgr tancel fy wen ial_ the contrasting decorative roe of the grid asa prominent piece of onsen anes visual iconography in pastmodemist graphic design more readily ximis ofa possible symbolic function. To understand these symbolic functions it will be necessary to firs examine some key junctures in the pre-twentieth-century eri sve” snarl ke connection beween ich sed besten Simpl Layee te ida devi for ss feming drawings fom one sate to ‘other fram on se noe, (bes back to ancient ype ar ret Ss evr since (ee Jomer Dai "United Drawing Tog he Uo ibid ftord Elements nd Gl Learde 5 (1972) 19, especialy the seston os “Gr Snare Weve ar) 12) Tht his combaasion wa bth ioe an epracuaie of 3 ne" cote saggene ningthe eninge perp raped eed sive pining. by the many at ing perpcive achive gol elle forthe few ho wed bch aa Inet not of reresentton, But of regan 20 expression inthe grid, may be observed, First, there isthe intense fascination with surface appearance and its description. This is coupled, in leading individuals, with the quite different interest in the invisble laws and struceual principles that underlie external appratance."” And third, chere is the incressed status of che rational ming itself, seeking to discover structure through crite observation. S ‘As one moves rom the Renaissance toward the wwenteth cen- tury, theresa gradual hiftin emphasis from appeatanceto struc- cure accompanying theever rapid growth of natural :cience called natural philosophy).! With the writings ofthe seventeenth-cen tury French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, underlying structure and rationality achieve their most powerful expression. Descarts's Discourse on Method (1637) was to serve 25 aprinciple stimulus informing not only the use and meaning of the grid in this period, but alo problem solvingin lace twentieth- century design." With Descartes, knowledge ic achieved by action of human reasoa, not divine revelation. Furthermore, the goal of knowledge s the physical world and itslaws, not God and the supersensible world, as had earlier been the cate. The grid’s identification with material reality and laws is evident in his ‘weatise Geometry, alsoof 137. There, Descartes lays the founda- tion for an analytical geometry which defines the position of coor- dinates and axes -conceivedas numerical quantities on aplarein space. Yet with Descares’s stresson abstraction, the grid associ- ation with the world of outer appearances loocens. As the rules elaborated in the Discourse made clear, appearances are suspect, anda problem (or in visual terms, afield) is tobe divided into its smallest component parts. This geometric, reductive operation i, of course, a mental process, The grid thus comes torepreseat not oonly the structural laws and principles behind physical appear- ance, but the process of rational thinking ise. So timely i this conception that, by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth cen- tury, the concepts of Nature and Reason achieved the status of, leading ideas and came to be used interchangeably. Signs of this reciprocity are evident, for example, in the application of the ‘Canesian grid to the exterior landscape, asin the ease of he great, French geometrical gardens. tenet xeomecien giuens Yer itis a the end of theeighteenth century that ve find one of, the best examples of the Cartesian grid bearing such symbolism, ‘The intellectual climate at this time was characterized by deism, a movement which was a well-established by-product of rationalism, The latteris a theory that rejected formal religion and the conceptof supernatural revelation butargued that the logic of nature demonstrated God's existence, Conceived as the Great Clockmakes, God had designed the world as a machine run by natural laws and then had abandoned it to run by itself This mechanistic determinism informed the use of the grid by the19) Bary eamples inode, acthecumofthe seventh etary, Lecnarde de Vines Ensen of codareein order wnder- ‘sande tare bose, mance, fue and the effet of theve on eneroal Badly form and moversert Alo, 2 censry ond, hefietcompossdmcro- scope was devopedy hus opening = ‘rinow ono nati phenomena ing. ‘elo che tea of he vr tales, nthe Daou, Datars pretense rales for seqiing knewiedge, which nay be paraphrased aselows (1) doube i at ot clealy evden o be eae td do necacepe surface sppenrance,(2) eaye begin by dividing each problem into its elles: compere pars, (3) shreyscelct hous i logeal onder ‘proceling fom that shih sos si [leva thot which ie mot comple, and G)seuon igorondy and geome and never skp loi ep: Raber Nie Toe Making ofthe Modern Mand (Sew Yas: Cole rabin Unive Pres 93/176), 285, 16) Jew Clay, Romantica (New Jey: ‘Cherwell Boks e981) 35. Design Issues: Vol. IIl, No. 2 French neoclassicist painter Jacques Louis David in his painting The Death of Socrates of 1787. In the charcoal study of this paint- ing (figure 8), David used the grid not merely as anillusionistic tool for transferring the drawn figure of Socrates from paper to canvas; rather, the rigid network of horizontals and verticals, evi- dent in the wall behind Socrates, is represented in the finished painting as well.'* The grid, which invades and integrates itself into the figure’s very gestures, signifies the rational, impersonal, and inevitable character of natural law, which dete controls the structure of the material world and of events within that world. Indeed, the main theme of David's painting isthe syl- logistic inevitability of Socrates's death by his own hand as acon- sequence of his rigid adherence to the laws of rational thought and logically determined behavior. ‘The modern grid By the second decade of the twentieth century, the full develop- ment of the Cartesian grid was realized. The dual emphasis on appearance and structure that had characterized the symbolism of the grid during the Renaissance, scientific revolution, and Enlightenment now moved strongly toward struccure and away from appearance and the illusionistic depiction of external phenomena. ‘The architectonic and constructive values so central phenomena, ‘The architectonic and constructive values so central to the early twentieth-century modernist canon were inherited from the preceding century. Violet-le-Duc’s or Joseph Paxton’s promotion of exposed iron structure in buildings, Christopher Dresser’s functional Arts and Crafts design of teapot handles based on bird and fish skeletons, or art nouveau’s rejection of the applied surface decoration of Victorian design wereall nineteenth- century expressions ofthis exodus from a belief in surface appear- ance as an esthetic end in itself ‘The Cartesian tradition in France continued to act as the major stimulus for the grid ast assumed its modernist embodiment. For practical purposes, the process may be said to begin with Paul ‘Cézanne’ initial move away from Renaissance illusionism toward the abstraction and geometricization of natureand an emphasis on the flat field of the picture plane. This impulse continues through the faceting of the picture plane by synthetic cubism to produce an overall effect, and it pealss when Piet Mondrian takes up the picto- rial grid of synthetic cubism to explore and purify it in virtual iso- lation from other pictorial elements. Under cubism’s influence, Mondrian’s naturalistic subject matter became progressively abstracted until, in 1915, he could paint a circular field of short horizontal and vertical bars and title it Pier and Ocean. His paint ings in the years immediately following continued to employ ver- tical and horizontal bars, sometimes colored and usually not touching, on a white field. Often these bars appear to continue off the edge of the canvas, suggesting that the field extends infinitely aFig. 6) Piet Mondrian, Comporiton seth Red, Yellow and Blas, 1923 is inven “Special Theory of Rescnig® of 905, Enstcn bd deed hein a mete fiwin ene Son The media concep os qa: they diferned ro ered nese onsting of phys and speryseal dimensions war tut colapied iro 4 Ionbieasc. pica vere cone ceived of o being in continuous exten Sion le terms ef Mondrian’ work he ‘elerene so the seni ise ase ofthe (Gil in Pir and Oceen (1913) vongets that he conuinsum paradigm was etab- led well befor his mature works of the 920s, in all directions although the viewer sees only that portion visible within the “window” of the canvas. By 1920, Mondrian’s pictorial vocabulary is established and consists of a white field through which travel continuous black horizontal and vertical bars that bound intermittently occurring rectangular zones of primary color (figure 6). The composition still implicitly extends beyond the borders of the canvas, and (according to Mondrian) the bars cross one another and overlap, but do not actually intersect. The resulting grid is of the line-based type andis thoroughly Cartesian in its presentation of an unchanging regular and isotropic universal field, ruled by logic and by the mathematical law that underlies the world of external appearance. The same conception is ‘expressed in three dimensions in the Red and Blue Chair of 1917 by Gerrit Rietveld, who, like Mondrian, was associated with the ‘Dutch de Stijl movement. Each axial structural member of the chair bypassed rather than abutted its neighbor and was painted black, with the exception of the exposed yellow end which sig- nified it as an arbitrary terminus for an otherwise infinitely ‘extending axis (figure 7). This concept of an axially-defined field in infinite extension brings the symbolism of the Cartesian grid to its highest stage of development by linking it with the concept of a universal con- tinuum drawn from contemporary physics.” Thede Sil grid vis- ualized this physical spatial continuum not so much in material ‘terms, but rather in terms of the mathematical laws that rule mat- tex, space, and time. Mondrian’s two-dimensional composition and Rietveld's chair were thus subsets of a larger universal field described by the grid. Also, because the modern grid was synonymous with the continuum itself, it may be defined equally ‘well as asct of continuous axes or as anever-ending series of mod ules, The modern grid thus continued to be a field-based matrix predicated on the line and module. * The modernist principle of continuousness was applied as much to space as to material. The exploded form of Rietveld’s chair par- tially dematerialized the object by dispersing it into the spatial field; space was thus allowed to circulate uninterrupted through the chair. This field-centered approach, which sought to oppose ‘the object- or possession-centered ideals of the Victorian bourgeoisie (as expressed in their dark, massive, and closed furni- ture forms) was also to become the ideal of modernist interior space. Examples of this are the flowing spaciousness of Mies van der Rohe’ interiors and the “free plan” of Le Corbusier, as are the reductive furniture forms they developed based on skeletal line and supporting plane, which subordinated the piece of furniture to the greater realities of streaming space and light. But although the concept of themodern grid as a representation of the ubiquitous and invisible field of universal physical law was not too different in general meaning from that of the Cartesianof tsi che Weineabol Hong Pj done forthe Deusche Werkbued ‘ition of 127 and directed by Mies ‘ander Robe, and general regarded os the ft offical expenion the Inte ‘sional Syn Europe tchitcre. ‘The projctsoughe, through he rational sardadiation of budding forms and ‘materia, vo achieve a uslormiy of vie Jnand expresso. ig 8) Jan Techichol, Pronpects for DieNewe Typoqrpbie, D2. 19) Fences Bae, “Modern Typograty.” The grid of the eighteenth century, its specific meanings were closely tied to early twentieth-century events and ideas which informed the modern grid and, later on, the postmodern grid. A basic characteristic of twentieth-century conceptions of the field is the de-emphasis of the point coordinate or individual unit (not unlike the de-valuation of the point which occurred in the shift from the late medieval to the Renaissance grid). This de-emphasis was an implicit feature, for example, of the homogeneous continuum of Einstein or of the anti-object paradigm of the Rietveld chair’ exploded form. The pro-field, anti- or neutralized-point para- ddigm also characterized leading conceptions of the person-envi- ronment relationship during this period. For example, inthe fields of sociology and psychology, Durkheim, Freud, and Watson described human behavior as environmentally or statistically determined. In the sociopolitical realm, socialist, communist, and collectivist writings and experiments placed great emphasis on groups and on relationships between groups, thereby de- emphasizing the importance of the autonomous individual. And in the sphere of design, the artists and designers affliated with de Sei and che Bauhaus felt that the passionate indi atthe root of the competing nationalisms which had caused World War I must be countered by an international impulse in archivecture and design chat would transcend national styles and differences.'® therefore not surprising that an anti-individualist vision expressed itself in the entire spectrum of innovations which accompanied the use of the Cartesian grid in European graphic design in the late 1920s. The underlying, invisible matrix of the grid guided the placement not of manually produced letterforms orexpressive gestures, butof clean and geometric sans seriftypog- raphy. Horizontal and vertical bars and rules were also used to subdivide the page space and corresponded to certain axes of the underlying grid. The leading innovators to employ this family of clements included El Lissitzky (The Isms of Art, 1925), Herbert Bayer, and Lészl6 Moholy-Nagy (Bauhaus publications), cul- minating in the formulaic expression of the philosophy and method of this approach by Jan Tschichold in his 1928 book, The New Typography (figure 8). The field axiom behind this form of graphic communication was also evident in factors beyond the use of the grid and of copy that was factual and impersonal. For exam- ple, the asymmetric distribution of typographic elements on the page created an overall visual tension that converted the negative white space from a passive toan active value. The entire visual field swat thus dynamically brought into play. The tension of ths field ‘was due as well to the use of sans serif typography, which decreased visval interaction berween different letterforms and between letters and white space." This lack of interaction between the individual letcer and its neighbors was another exam- ple of the element of the impersonal. In addition, the preference B‘inl convertion withthe suroucing ‘hie spe. Open, sinuous, or sem Tngly dulning art nouwras. eters (fectentthemmvounding pec ering in eddies in sod wound thentee sod ‘ne anothr Thisexpresveelaionchp fallen sre planes nthe de Invtiore sod domenica Tn each Intancet the nurice wor conceved of at ‘noble, ving meneame with az nner being out of which expeeivg forme ‘vould, manfeet themecver in low ‘eslprra ried Thos, in te cue of rely orgie a newves) leer= fame of, Hees Van de Velde ile for Vas Na en Sabra 193, or One Eckana Fete Ecenens sypetce of 190) thewhite ofthe page a snaat S genernive surf of which grew (ot ii the reiace of mar upon wich ‘hie erace we module) King lore, Naval, dhe Tsing forme wore only ed tothe evionrental eld of ravre trom which they spearg, The a os wel Canesian plane, More p ‘whe apace of the Carin Fld sig ‘ified the deseed pail feld ofthe ‘dine made fn inthe continasm of ‘Elutcin. The esvangemen of the sana seifletsdrn omit Geld win ah ‘ympromatcexrenion ofthe inet ing shemaion of rordere rand rot from the word (a vllected in the pro- field an-indvidual puadigne aed scusnd). I was therfore not cin dene tha, ring the desade of the 1920s ia which hi rival langage of rmodecrit graphics was beng arice- Teed the sme mesiage mas Being ver bully expreed in the exinenaliom of {Fe Gorman ilosop het Marin eg ir (profesor ac Marburg 1923-28, Ber [in 92653 i i 1927 bok, Being and Nothing, 20) Lanting examples ofthicncade Rayer aniveral”lowerase alphabet of 1925 and Tichicholds “singe ese" alphaber or, Fig. 9) Dan Fricdman, change of shies ard 1976. Pr for principally lowercase letters - even tothe point of occasionally refusing to use uppercase initials for proper names or sentence beginnings? — reveals an antihierarchic disposition that disdained the elevation in status of the individual (be ita person's name or other proper noun) above an otherwise homogeneous field. ‘The subsequent generation of Swiss graphic designers expanded the applications of the mathematically drawn grid and brought it to a level of perfection and elegance, without, however, altering its basic use as a tool for rationally structuring and delivering fac- tual information. Representative designers of the Swiss school included Theo Ballmer, Emil Ruder, and Joseph Miller- Brockmann, who acted as the movement's chief theorist and spokesman. The movement proved to have much international influence in the 1950s and 1960s, although the grid itself retained the same meaning it had in the 1920s; that is, as the continuous field of rational law which underlay the physical universe much the way the grid itself remained invisible “beneath” the final design composition. As Miiller-Brockmann’s own book, Grid ‘Systems, made clear, the modern Swiss grid retained all the Carte sian symbolism it had possessed during the early modernist era and remained a rational, universally valid, objective, and furure- oriented design tool.”* The postmodern grid ‘The modern Swiss grid enjoyed its heyday during the decade of the 1960s. But during the 1970s a number of graphic designers began to overthrow the conventions of modernist graphics and use the grid to new ends. The representative work of Yale graphics instructor Dan Friedman (figure 9), or that of former Emil Ruder student and Basel School of Art graphic design professor Wolfgang Weingart (figure 10, 11), illustrate the changed use and features of the grid within postmodernist graphic design. The ‘postmodernist grid no longer acted as the invisible logic “behind”2) Inthe chapter ented “Grid and Dosen Philosophy." Miller Brockman ae, The uta he gad a an orering aye tum sche expen of scorain mental trv conuetivg and ected 0 the fave the len Ili fancsonay and sree uy ‘ich he gr sysermmennssubmitingto Inet of tive vlidig” Ard fealy 2 Tate gel fore cnalyeal hin ing ind ges he sation a thepriem gested maverl tae” Joe! Mal lerBrockmann, “Grid Syme (New Yorks Hastings Howse, 198) 2) Weng cover denign fr she $974 spsing and summer sever ofthe oat ble Langage ecemeinatnces fovea underexposed pega Jn which ecogaton sf wordt nad nh stale oon ipo, Fig, 1) Wolfgang Weingart, Suse Art ‘Aid poner, ig) Woligang Weingart, magarine cover combining rational clarity yp ‘alo Swiss graph modernism with 2 entradtory ase of rules which cut inte telins of ypeto produce various level oie, 1979 Design Issues: Vol. IIT, No. 2 the composition, but was often visually exposed and used asa sub- ordinate decorative element. The grid was sometimes tilted and made to express antirationality and randomness. It was often coupled with other seemingly accidental marks or manually applied gestural (signature) elements, in stark contrast to the impersonal and overly rational compositions of Swiss modernism. Usually ehe grid was established and then violated (ignored) ot fractured along with the surface plane it defined. Both grid and composition departed radically from modernism's functionalist ‘ethic, sometimes to the point of sacrificing the clarity, legibility, and readability of the typographic message itself by disrupting the alignment of type or by in some way obscuring the individual ‘words and letcers.2? Like other manifestations of postmodern culture, the grid ‘expresses the general theme, in opposition to modernism, of anti- rationality and even irrationality. The most common variations on. this theme (many of which, when expressed visually as in architec ture or graphic design, utilize a common iconography) include the celebration of irrational or violent phenomena, often depicted as occurring behind the veil of surface appearance, or the representa- tion of surfaces or facades as blatantly false, sometimes with the suggestion of some unknown quantity or realm concealed behind them. In contrast to the modernist tendency to openly reveal structure and purpose via functional form, these surface planes are 25perforated or fractured to suggest that they are thresholds atthe border of a mysterious, often nonmaterial dimension. To under stand the significance of the postmodern theme of araionality or irrationality asit is reflected in the recent iconography of popular culture and design (of which the grid is pat), an examination ofits sources is necessary. The first major source isthe antirational undercurrent of twentieth-century modernism. The second, mo immediate, source is the movement that begins in the 1960s and conginues intothe present as conscious reaction to modernitm. In addition to the early twentieth-century concept of the field as a rational network of predictable mechanistic laws regulating physical realty (e.g., the universal field of de Stijl), there was a notion of the feld a a far less determinate set of forces. The origi nal notion of afield” was putforthin the mid-nineteenth century by the English scientist Michael Faraday. Faraday explained how atoms and molecules, with so much space surrounding them, were held in spatial extension by an electrically charged, tentacle-like network that spread invisibly through the earth’s matter and the space surrounding the earth (since identified as carth’s elec- tromagnetic field). The components of this newark Faraday called “lines-oF-force,” and these helped explain why changes in ‘one part of a field occurred atthe same time as changes in far dis- tant parts of the same field even though no connecting physical action berween the two was evident. Faraday’s concept of electrical lines-of-force waslater absorbed. into the Italian futurist’ revolutionary philosophy of dynamic speed and change. Drawing on the pictorial innovations of cubism, futurist painters used a similarly gridded picture plane to represent not only outer movement but the inner forces of elee- tricity and will which interpenetrate and incite both muscular and ‘mechanical action.” Impulsive, impassioned action, usualy of a destructive kind, not cool caleslation or rational passiviey, was the hallmark ofthe futuristcredo. The movement’ manifesto, written in 1909 by Filipo Tommaso Marinetti, poet and founder of futurism, centers on an accourt of areckless, high-speed auto race through the streets of Milan atnight. The account i characterized by an intoxication with death and destruction and presents the reader with a themecommon to most later futurist work: that vol- canic forces beneath the calm surface of outer physical and social aner of X rays and she func A Ciserf he movement aie, Set Elavi shih eves generating co plece and. powshovia wee the favored bailing. 26 lar message was presented in 1927 by physicist Werner Heisenberg, the same year the Weissenhof Housing Project sig- naled a triumph for modem architecture's clean rational geomet- ries and functional hyouts. Heisenbergs discovery, known in physics as the “indeterminacy principle,” revealed that beneath the predictable mechanistic laws that rule the visible world in which welive, another set of laws with no apparent order operated at the atomic level upon which, it was assumed, the world wasbuilt. This imerpretation of the worldis the complete opposite of that symbolized by the Cartesian grid, which piewures the sub- structure of the world 2s rational, predictable, and deterministic. “The notion thatreality may appear rational outside while being, irrational inside had been persuasively argued even earlier by Sig- mund Freud, who posited alibidinal reservoir of powerful dri yy and impalses operating beneath the level of a person's cansciot awareness and behavior. With Freud, the contingent twentieth- century theme of the freeing of forces that are arational or irra~ tional and that are located beneath the normal world of outer appearance and bringing them up into the outer world, finds dramatic expression. Freud's original use of hypnotism to release the repressed memories of traumatic episosles was superseded by his well-known technique of “iree [word] association,” which accomplished a sinilarend without hypnosis, This technique was, appropriated (and renamed “psychic automatism”) by the nihils- tic Dadaist art movement which arose in response to the devasta- tion and inhumanity of World War I. In both its methods an« products, Dadaism satvically celebrated the ierational in. man, Surrealism, Dada’s main descendant, likewise extemalized psy- chic events occurring below the surfice of consciousness in the form of hallucinogenic dreamscape paintings or other artforms designed to engage not the viewer’s conscious self, but his or her subrational side. ‘The theme of releasing powerful “subphysical” forces (ie., forces below the level of external physical reality) is again ex- pressed in the year 1919, In the modlemist calendar of key histori- calevents that year marks the founding of the Weimar Bauhaus, the major force in the institutionalization of rationalis: design theory and practice. Fer thehistory of irrationality, however, 1919 ‘marks the date when the first atom was successfully smashed. The 24)The sease of ans, hen menace he charactered ap mporact per of ‘Heidi Amen nce. There tsee ofthe old wa you she pe ims ndshe por Spurikrhos tck ‘Psi ene dha wo vate ee leet he eso thea void ‘cca eran ih Design Issues: Vol. Il, No. 2 fruit of this event was the ability to tamper with atomic structure and s0 release huge amounts of explosive force and deadly radia- tion from the level of atomic events into the world of plants, ani ‘mals, and human beings, as manifest by the dropping of to atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, The subject of the destructive release of irrational, sabphysical forces onto the physical plane became key theme in the iconography of postwar popular eul- ture and came 10 inform postmodern architectural, graphic design, and advertising iconography as well. For example, the films of Japanese director Ishiro Honda (e.g., Gedaille 1954, Rodin 1956) featured a beast accidentally released from a state of subterranean hibernation by a careless atomic explosion. ‘The beast, equipped with either radioactive breath or vision, would then proceed to destroy Japan’s major urban centers.” Prior to 1960, therefore, antiraionalist tendencies and traditions in ewen tieth-century art, scientific thought, and popular culture existed side by side with the stream of modernist rationality. 2”2 Feud and mvc Fg Laan ered tat spesoes spec trom ‘apresing de thoughts tie consious ioe sel exposed nal This “Other we sein prior and more selthin 3 pen’ erin. Lcan ‘snaned ht tony, hehecon ‘Sours, wasn wae ion Fo Towing. Lacan, recrraliMhel Fructu enced te soni of the ‘srt “Oe” il re ia 966 Cows, 27 "Seurucson,” Dctoury Of the Hier of Idee ows York Gas ribo te San 17), 329. 26) The dapcler which serie sbe fighc rome piss esis his pie ews epee autor os, and the siniatnof acnsciut est oforbysame"otee" se 27) Tre ial, owing ed eersen re aang or Sneed concious ‘Athoug sy sign oman So ‘Mowry Tosed fom ional or ‘eco mes commonly usd mason vith compute snd fightch aver Teeth appropri oasuch the cena ish lime exertion (Shemedinerr of emanates 28 Ik was out of the antirationalist stceam which coalesced in the 19608 and early 1970s that postmodernism was to arise. During this period two concerns were expressed which played a central symbolic role in later postmodernist iconography in general and in that of the grid in particular. First, these was a conviction that surfaces were false and superficial. Second, there was an interest and exploration of that which lay behind such surfaces. As t baby boom generation became disillusioned with the Vietnam ‘war, big business, corrupt goveramental leaders, and the capitalist, value system in genera, all surface phenomena (norms and con- ventions) were questioned, mocked, and satirited. Pop art satirized thehollow commercialized images of consumeradvertis- ing by adopting the techniques and presentational scale of magazine and billboard advertising imagery. Robert Venturi’s 1966 postmodernist manifesto, Learaing jrom Las Vegas, gloried in che falseness of the commercial facades of the Las Vegas strip and promoted the false surface 2s a model for a new movement in architecture. No longer did the outside have to be functionally relited to the inside, Rather, superficial decoration was allowed, and the resulting contradiction or discontinuity between inside and outwas itself strong critique of the clean, rational exterior of modernist architecture “This love of parodying the falseness of surface appearances in arcane! architecture had its counterpart in the structuralist mover ment in French linguistics. Strongly colored by Marxist deter- rinism, structuralism exercised a major influence in American vniversities during the 1970s, accompanying the demoralization of America and the expansion of Soviet power. Unlike moder- nism, siructuralism held that surface appearances were false and that rationality was itself a surface phenomenon under which lurked a subrational self unknown to us.”° The structuralist attempt to demonstrate that rationality, the conscious self, and conscious speech were false fronts for irrationality was rep- resented in postmodernist graphic design as well. For example, Weingart’ fracturing of the gridded surface (figure 10) rep- resented the destruction of the field of the rational mind.”* The ubiquitous use of the tilted grid evident in magazine ads, posters, television graphics, and oxher popular media over the last several ‘years, also represents the arational orirational, beczuse the grid ~ as asymbol of thefield of consciousness~has become disoriented inits detachment from the world, as indicated by its lack of grav tational orientation.2” Furthermore, the defilement of the typo- iraphic message by Weingart (Figure 11) and other postmodernist graphic designers was analogous to the structaralis’s belief that language did not represent the conscious, rational self, but the “other,” subrational self. April Grieman, a student of Weingart, took the destruction ofthe surface plane further by depicting pla- ‘nar fragments exploding forth ina field of deep illusionistic space.‘ mented planes wor that “pire tee donde wit + poten of les The some abendan’ of ees haces much of pormodere rhe av well ke, fer eample, Gales Moores Pande cf B75: ‘in ale ners pon ler of fae fatale sand othe pigher of anopen ‘ney of sieton fost on the fete and on the ge of shins ‘Spal of pomoseism ingen Archacoure. waphig, forte an errs abouad. wih. colder tieed ane comely “popping Seay" rom another Poamtenst hoursipichaceinstby aden Ia tne peiperd or ange pes Taher tan ence sey, cking iphencann am a ng an he eesti of rained ind cored wee rem of wate infor feed Toons This uch for “ober” te friksh solve thin pore troderitwrtags seed in Rabe Darmon "Pop Pouce” The New Yok Kee Bots Orbe, 1s In poplin he See Min Sir apeesoneo!pstmoderam’ ‘Heme othe le rent cary oat Foplesed by 3.8. ens wis pom The Seed Comings Thing ‘gues be cere inne bold Mere ‘enon ea 29)The 9 mor Jam wich speed» tah ofsimilarmvi, fast nom oth killer sic whch fed beneath the plaid war sre mig teaches et ly to bus spa sed all sonsons back dove atone Se) Niche! Rif, The At of Tr New York Seon sed Schuster 182), Design Issues: Vol. tl, No. 2 The theme of “otherness,” of what lay behind the plane, was now becomiiig more important than the defilementof the plane ive One common compositional feature of Grieman’s work during the late 1970s and early 1989s was anempry exploding core, with planar shards moving toward the periphery of the layout (her 7V «awards poster of 1981 featured 2 trapezoidal black “window” « infinitely deep space near composition cemter, out of whic. exploded numerons objects). ‘The representation of an exploded surface plane was 2 favored subject in television advertising during these years as well. A popular Shell Oil Company advertisement filled the television screen with 2 flat white field upon which was printed the Shell logo. Through this would burst a car, thus creating the illusion that it was entering the space of one’s living room, The first Shell ad of this type was aired in 1964, and the company has continued 10 use this formar, extending it co magazines in the 1980s (figure 12), Schlitz. Male Liquors television commercials inthe late 1970s similarly featured a bull bursting through the wall of a room in which beer drinkers st. Beyond the specific subtextual meaning that alcohol could release the subrational, animal side ofa person, this ad joined with the large number of similar commercials and cinematic images of powerful, often menacing entities bursting into the viewer’ space in indicating that the destruction of the plane of surface reality and the rational world o/ predictable events ‘was dueto the eruption of irrational forces from a world behind oF below the plane of outer reality. The surface plane was thus not 0 be trusted and wasin facta threshold toa nonrational realm on the ‘other side of normal reality. The modernist vision of a logically constructed physical reality underlaid by an equally logical set of predictable mechanistic laws was thus replaced by a postmoder- nist vision of outer reality 28a sham underlaid by amore real but nonrational st of unpredictable forces Yet, side by side with the postmodern iconographical drama of subterranean forces exploding through the surface plane into the viewer’sspace was the reverse scenario of diving into and through the surface plane from the physical into a subphysical, nonmate- rial realm. Simulating amicroscope with a 200% lens, the opening credits of the 1980 computer-animated film Tron carried the viewer into a letter of the word “Tron,” down through a micro- {grid composing the larger letter, and darough that ged into a non- material world of micro-electrical phenomena. The same “trans- fer” was repeated in the story itself when the main character was “digitized” a he sat before a computer terminal. He was then absorbed through the computer screen and reconstitted “below” in anonmaterial realm defined by electronic grids and menacing, compurter-generated beings.» A similar “descent” was the subject of 2 1984 television commercial in which the viewer accomparied a Camaro driving through a car-sized black Chevrolet logo that 29‘Upward throughs deep faoure in the rs 31) Aste of books were writen in hee nwteenth century that dealt vith escending 1 the sener ofthe cacy suchas Ales Advenes Underonnd (ater tiled Ale fn Wondotond Jour= ‘ny 16 the Center of the Ee, sed [26000 Leaner Under the Sea, ny of whith wee turned into” Aneean ‘movies inthe 19501. French filmmaker Jean Conese fine Hod of 4 Poet (830) and Orphen (180) repented {beulardocests- sow nto the nana Uderwork of he sel ~ by avg the main charter past through the ‘heethold of mio SN This le well exemplified in he eehroperorphic symbol hich ‘hounds inthe Borse,shing oi, ‘salam fhe ean Memphis gro. ‘The sass angular of thee figures refer to elec phenome (se for ‘rample,Etore Sates Asbohe Table Lemp. fist pag13,Desgn [see 1 [Spring 1985), and may dew frm he ‘acer aan fori conepion ofthe human bing bated on spy ele. seal force stood on atest track, which in turn led to red, subterranean land- scape wherein dwelt a large, reptilian monster, The threshold to the superphysical of the late medieval grid has thus been com- pletely reversed in postmodernism. In postmodernism, the frac tured surface plane acts instead as a threshold to the subphysical and subrational. ‘The descent of rational consciousness beneath the surface of matter has always been a central activity of modern science in its study of material phenomenon. Because of this, che descent of consciousness into and “beneath” matter became a common ‘theme in popular art and literature from the late nineteenth cen- tury to the present.*” For example, in the 1967 Charles and Ray Eames film for IBM, entitled Powers of Ten, the Einsteinian con- cept of the infinite as the finite in extension was given physical expression as the camera first zoomed into the universe and then returned to microscopically descend — through a man’s hand ~ to the molecular, atomic, and then subatomic level. Modernist rationality inevitably led, as Heisenberg experienced, from a fixa- tion on the surface of material phenomena to its subsequent pene- tration and the arrival of rational consciousness to analien, nonra- tional sphere. Because modem science had rejected the concept of ‘anonmaterial, superphysical dimension, it was inevitable that the probe of rational consciousness must confine itself to material reality and to the nonmaterial, subsensible realty beneath it. Despite the positive accomplishments of postmodernism ~ a throwing off of a severe rationalism which denied more intuitive faculties, an exploration of symbolic and decorative values, and a recognition and utilization of the past — the movement is at base limited by an insufficient image of the human being, an interpreta- tion that generally admits of only rational and subrational facul- ties.** Postmodernism may thus be considered a form of late mod- ‘emis, inasmuch as it reveals rather than surpasses the key limita- tions of modernism’s conception of the human being. The foregoing survey has tried to show that, with few apparent alterations to the basic form itself, the grid has shifted in its mean- ing from a threshold between physical and superphysical worlds, to 2 representation of the surface of the physical world and the rational cognition which beholds it, toa threshold to thesubmate- rial world and irrationality. In each period, the grid has thus expressed a leading conception of man and world prevalent a that time.