Perspective formalized the rules for the reproduction of distance in images. It was also during the 15th century that the concept of geometrical perspective began to take hold in the arts. In China, the Kao Gong Ji (or Book of Diverse Crafts, a treatise on science and technology from the 1st century BC) stated that “a capital city should be square nine main streets crisscrossing the city and defining its grid-pattern,” and grids had been used for urban planning in various parts of the country since the 15th century BC. The Empire’s expansion drove the development of grid-based towns and cities throughout its vast territories, and many European towns were later constructed upon the plan of the Roman colonial outposts that lay beneath them. Influenced by Greek ideas, the Etruscans introduced the grid to the Italian peninsula, and the Romans themselves took it up during the period of the late Republic and early Empire: the standardization of their grid-based Roman castra or military camps, many of which later developed into towns and cities, meant soldiers could always orient themselves quickly, no matter where in the Empire they found themselves. The work of Hippodamus of Miletus, who sought to design cities that were regular and rational (unlike, for example, Athens, which had evolved spontaneously and chaotically), helped the grid plan gain widespread acceptance in 5th century BC Greece, and Alexander the Great would later deploy Hippodamus’ urban planning method across his extensive empire. The grid-based city of Mohenjo-daro of the ancient Indus Valley Civilization, circa 2500 BC Grid-based cities were also a feature of Mesoamerican architecture, with cities such as Teotihuacan in Mexico covering areas of eight square miles. Grids have played a vital role in human life and our perception of our environment since the beginning of recorded history: we have been using them as the basis for our dwelling places since at least the third millennium BC, when cities divided into grids of straight streets were already being constructed in the Indus Valley, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. As rocket-fin styling symbolizes the sleek and innocent aspirations of the 1950s, the grid is now the symbol par excellence of “The Eighties,” a now-mythological time when a cocktail of affluence, Cold War tensions, and the encroaching power of computing combined to confer upon the dreamers of the West a form as memorable as it was ephemeral. It is hard to believe that it once communicated such a potent sense of transformation and possibility, but it did just that. Usually depicted as a network of glowing straight lines receding in perspective against a black background, occasionally with the outlines of mountains or the blush of dawn visible on the horizon, the light grid (or laser grid, or neon grid) today is in widespread use as the appropriated expression of a perceived aesthetic, a tongue-in-cheek signifier of the naïve dreams of Generation X. Of all the visual shorthand for a particular type of outmoded futurism, one of the most immediately recognizable-like the chrome lettering with which it is often paired-must be the light grid.
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