Abstract

The case studies presented in this article—Superstudio’s "Continuous Monument" project, Stanley Kubrick’s film "2001: A Space Odyssey," and Francois Schuiten and Benoît Peeters’s "Fever in Urbicand" graphic novel—invite us to speculate on new, non-Euclidean forms that can (and have been) introduced into the discipline with the advent of CAD/CAM design, or, what Charles Jencks described as “architecture of complexity.” The text focuses on the history of a cultural form—being the grid, understood as a pattern—along with the process of attributing to it a new understanding of “architectural complexity,” evidenced by the examples ranging from film, comics, to drawings/photo montages. It aims at discovering an updated geometrical image, attempting to seize characteristics of mutability, transitiveness, and dynamics, thus expressing shifts in the discipline, as well as those in our worldview.