The Grid

The Grid is a series of black-and-white images of modernist housing facades, photographed in Hong Kong, London, the Algarve and Amsterdam. Each image is built from a single photograph of one building, tiled until the facade becomes pure pattern: thousands of identical cells held in perfect symmetry.

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These are buildings we designed for ourselves. They were meant to solve a real problem: how to house enormous numbers of people efficiently, equally, well, and the order they produce has its own kind of beauty. The symmetry is almost calming.

 

What the photographs hold against that is the discomfort of imagining a life inside it. A life as one cell among thousands, repeated in every direction, indistinguishable from the cell beside it. The system we built to solve a problem is the same system that quietly asks what kind of life it leaves room for.