Interviews
In-depth dialogues with theorists, sound designers and post-digital practitioners.
Deconstructing the grid: a dialogue on accidental spatial order
A 90-minute recorded conversation with curator and architectural theorist Marcus Chen on how algorithmic fault-lines dismantle modernist structural discipline — in concrete and in memory.
Inside the subterranean drainage tunnels beneath Taipei during the monsoon of 2018. Stand inside a megastructure built on right angles and you realise nature does not negotiate with coordinate systems [1]. Water curves. Shear forces accumulate across micro-fissures. The grid is an ideological overlay on an earth that keeps moving.
The difference is honesty. Concrete makes no attempt to disguise its brutality or its extraction. Touch 400 millimetres of poured aggregate and you feel the carbon debit, the tectonic weight, the grain of the formwork pressed into cement.
Recent field dispatches & critiques
[Elena Rostov] Marcus, in your recent monograph on non-orthogonal matrices, you argue that the Cartesian grid is not an instrument of order but an administrative fiction. When did that fiction fracture for you in physical space?
[Marcus Chen] Inside the subterranean drainage tunnels beneath Taipei during the monsoon of 2018. Stand inside a megastructure built on right angles and you realise nature does not negotiate with coordinate systems [1]. Water curves. Shear forces accumulate across micro-fissures. The grid is an ideological overlay on an earth that keeps moving.
[Elena Rostov] You draw a violent contrast between the permanence of brutalist monoliths and the supposed weightlessness of cloud storage. Aren't both simply infrastructural cages?
[Marcus Chen] The difference is honesty. Concrete makes no attempt to disguise its brutality or its extraction. Touch 400 millimetres of poured aggregate and you feel the carbon debit, the tectonic weight, the grain of the formwork pressed into cement.
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