AIR Grid: Partial Recall

Operating under the rubric of ‘The Big Air World ‘ and working with a medium generically called ‘Air Grid’, a group of experimental architects were interested in proposing architectures which, if not invisible, were poised on the threshold of what is humanly perceptible. Such architectures of ‘miniscule impressions’ were to be understood as coherently constructed systems of materially embodied ideas. The exhibited piece recorded here was called Five Houses and some Curious Ideas. It was made with the specific intention of thinking about Ideas; the aim was to test the all-too-hasty assumption that the Ideas at stake in the generation of any Air Grid Architecture are those of the ‘rectilinear grid’ and the ‘rectangular module’. However, The installation could also be understood as a pause for reflection on the more general question as to whether it is correct to consider AIR Grid forms as belonging to the realm of Ideas at all; and if not how, or in what way, are we to account for them?