The Permanence of the Grid. Formal Variations on the Facade from the Classical Age to the Contemporary Age

Western architecture was born with the Greek world, which defined a vocabulary of forms and syntactic constructions that were handed down until the twentieth century, through countless metamorphoses. With the advent of the Modern Movement, a new language—antithetical to the classic one—was consolidated, repealing rules and models used up to that moment and defining new design and typological approaches. Despite an apparent change of paradigms, however, it is possible to identify in the facade grid (understood as a layout consisting of orthogonal elements between them) an expressive persistence that, through formal variations and simplifications, has managed to survive to the present day. The contribution proposed in this publication aims to provide a critical reading of the variations on the façade—occurred over the centuries—developed on a layout of common use: the grid. The use of this lucky expressive tool allows to observe in a timely manner the metamorphoses occurred historically and to understand the evolutions produced in the contemporary period. As the structural frame has become a common use element thanks to its versatility, so it happened with the grid; this, in fact, shows extreme geometric rigidity in its syntactic structure but at the same time allows great expressive freedom in its overwriting.