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Lost in the backlash

How refreshing to re-read Leslie Martin's classic ‘The Grid as Generator’ (arq 4/4). Where did it hide during the last 28 years? How useful it would have been as a measure for the proliferation of approaches to the city that have followed in a period that includes Krier's journey from the Royal Mint Square perimeter block to Poundbury, and Koolhaas' from Manhattan to the new dense megacities of the Far East. Martin's essay is in many ways exemplary. Coming from a cultured architectural position, but open to the possibility that certain parameters of design can usefully be quantified, he opens the possibility of a middle way for architectural research between the established numerically-based model of the physical sciences and the emerging discursive models of cultural studies.