Rento van Drunen,  Gridcollages

Rento van Drunen’s Gridcollages on pytr75’s blog put my mind back to Albert Pope’s book, Ladders which was published in 1996. This book was very influential on my work and my thinking about urban structures and the systems that are used to put and keep them in place. In Ladders, Pope suggested that the pre war urban grid, when it was first conceived, was an open system. But the post war period saw the grid eroded and slowly replaced with centripetal design strategies. A suburban cul-de-sac or office park, are classic examples of a centripetal system – individuals have little choice but follow a curved paths instead of a straight line. The prewar city was conceived on a centrifugal grid, a road system in which the basic premise was an open spatial field that was boundless and unlimited in form because of its formal simplicity…