We are the werewolves of the future, drinking the lifeblood of the past.

And how does that blood taste? Pretty darn sweet.

Criticizing the way this city has been, and continues to be, constructed is as valid as the target is easy. But how did we get here? What made the grid ‘the grid’? The psychological and emotional forces of a generation generally feed the dominant aesthetic. Recognizing this makes it easier to ask the question: are those forces still in play and still relevant? I suggest not. But this is all much better put by an author whose name (and the publication it comes from) I’ve lost (apologies):

“I think now that the suburbs were a kind of tranquilizer for the generation before us, if topography can be a drug. The blandness of ranch houses, the soothing lines of streets curving into cul-de-sacs, the homogeneity, the repetition, the pretty vacant names were designed to erase the desperation of poverty and strife, to erase tenements and barracks and migrant camps and sharecropper shacks… ”

So what does the grid give us today? Why continue using a model based on a quite different reality than most of us are used to?

“In its relentless patterned predictability, the grid offers assurance that if you happen to stray, you could easily return.”

Phoenix 21: Desert Metropolis, Nan Ellin (in Phoenix 21st Century City, Booth Clibborn Editions 2006).

We encourage everyone to stray. Just keep an eye out for those werewolves.