On the CIAM 7 Grid: from an Ideological to a Critical tool

Much historiographical research has been produced on the post-war CIAMs, demonstrating the importance of the CIAM Grid, proposed as a “thinking tool” for representing the town planning projects at the CIAM 7 in Bergamo (1949). This essay proposes a new critical and epistemological examination of the CIAM Grid, based on new archival documents and on a rereading of the exact words used by Le Corbusier, who proposed to consider the Grid as an ‘interlocutor’. Seventy years later, we therefore propose to go beyond the failure of CIAM 7 and to elaborate a “new Grid”, with the name of “Second Life Grid”, as a critical tool for discussing exclusively projects related with the new paradigm of recycling and reusing buildings and urban spaces. Starting from the question of the critical legacy of the CIAM Grid, our intention was to think of a Grid conceived no longer as an instrument of dogmatic and normative thought, but as an instrument of dialogical criticism, which has been tested through an open call for projects and an international conference held in Bergamo in October 2019.