Myth and Intertextuality in Architecture: The Grid from Eisenman to Fujimoto

Recently, the grid cage has become a small trend among Far Eastern architects. The emergence of this trend, led by well-known architects such as Kengo Kuma and SouFujimoto, is seen to be related to the publication in Japan in 2011 of La Fièvre D'Urbicande, a comic book produced in Belgium. The grid in this comic book brings to mind the transformation that the grid cage went through in Peter Eisenman's architecture as a fantastic structure. Eisenman, who began to develop a structuralist theory in the 1960s, began to deconstruct the grid and other elements that formed his theory by the end of the 1970s, as if he realized that they were mythical. As a result of this process, the grid ceased to be a conceptual object and became both physical and began to reveal its mythical structure. The grid that suddenly emerges from an architectural structure as something fantastic, a ghost, is also the main theme of La Fièvre D'Urbicande. It can be said that in Japan, the grid was cited not as a conceptual approach but as a fantastic image. Written and visual media that connect all these developments related to the grid mediate the textualization of architecture.