A few years ago a younger colleague suppressed several times the grid of the design drawings, floor plans, but also the façades and cross-sections. Because the project being concerned was a rather big and complex building (a campus for a French banking group) I asked for what reason the grid had disappeared.

To my astonishment the colleague told me that the grid (la trame in French) was not a very aesthetic attribute on an architectural drawing and should for that reason not be visible on the drawings. Although I re-introduced the grid, after explaining the necessity of it, it was unfortunately suppressed several more times by the same colleague.

At the beginning of my career in France it was the Engineering consultant who introduced the grid, constituted by a series of numbered axes and a perpendicular series of alphabetical order axes, soon after winning an architectural competition. It helped the engineers in conceiving an adequate rational structure, especially to facilitate the calculations, but also to locate architectural spaces, structural and architectural elements, technical equipment, etc. Very soon I started to introduce, as an architect, the grid in order not to be depending on (the logic of) the engineers, enabling me to conceive at an early stage myself the structural principles of the building. A gain of time and a better mastering of the architectural quality were very soon the result of this approach.

Recently I enjoyed a team at the beginning of the construction stage of a 70.000 square meters project (9 buildings of maximum 2 floor levels). To my astonishment the grid was very incomplete; many axes were without a number or an alphabetical letter. One numbered axis shifted position halfway the building, creating confusion for the construction company (which axis is the right one?). On top, the grid was modified by the architect without informing the main contractor. As one can imagine the company continued to work with the old grid, and the architect continued, as some other companies on the new grid. The result was serious difficulties of checking the construction drawings of the many different companies and an increased risk with of wrong positioned elements.

Apparently, the design team of the architectural office was very inexperienced, and nobody, including the engineering consultant took the time to introduce a reliable grid.

I am aware that it is not very interesting, neither very useful, to “accuse” the protagonist. We should rather think of what level of time compression is still acceptable, and for whom. Yep, time, or rather the lack of it, is nowadays quite often a more serious problem than we want to believe.