galleries

Air Grid: Five Houses

Victoria Watson

School of Architecture & the Built Environment, University of Westminster, London, UK

Introduction

Air grid material is a lightweight, three-dimensional rectilinear lattice structure made from lustrous, brightly coloured machine thread, drawn into a foam-board support and held taut in the grip of fine incisions, sliced into designated members of the ‘support armature’.

The principles of order according to which the rectilinear lattice structure is drawn consists in the vertical alignment of an array of equivalent ‘grid fields’, an equal distance apart, in the ‘air/space’ predetermined by the design of the foam-board support armature. It is by replication and addition of the single grid field that a block of air grid material is brought into formation.

Although the principles of order that determine the formation of air grid material are conceptually simple, in its material manifestation what is simple (the figure of the rectilinear lattice) is very hard to discern. Sometimes the air grid material will appear to condense a cloud of radiant plasma, at other times to vibrate, as if an invisible force were acting on the threads, switching them from on to off.

Air grid material quite literally constitutes a volume of coloured hatching in the air, acting, as a three-dimensional grating of sufficiently fine grain, so that the human visual system, as it scans back and forth, trying to make sense of what it sees, cannot fix an image. The effect is like that of a badly tuned television or radio, of unfocused information: vision cannot grasp what passes across its sensory field. But unlike the effect of a badly tuned instrument, which can be most disturbing to the viewing subject, the experience of watching air grid material is both delightful and strange. This strangeness, I believe, is due to three ideas that murmur beneath the threshold of perception.

Images

These can be viewed either as:

Individual images (via thumbnails on the left) or as a
Slideshow

In the slideshow click on the right-hand side of the images (or press keyboard N) to view the next image in the gallery, or click on the left-hand side of the images (or press keyboard P) to view the previous image.

An essay (166 KB) by the author can also be downloaded in PDF format.