NASA

Damien Hirst says ‘‘I was always fascinated by the NASA photographs of the moon. The way by laying a grid over an unknowable landscape they created a kind of confidence, something solid and believable. But I always felt the grid and the moon were never connected, they were always separate. I see buildings like that, as a three dimensional graph, or a grid. A geometrical structure to live in to give meaning to our lives. And in the same way the grid on the landscape of the moon doesn’t make sense and can never be combined I think buildings never fully combine with us’’.

Before architecture - do we ever fully combine with our bodies? They are mostly out of our control. They change without asking our permission. Even though we can train our bodies to do various things, as I have found with karate, ultimately the body dictates what’s possible, especially over time.

Euclidean geometry - points, straight lines and grids are a projection of the mind. They don’t exist in nature. Einstein shows us that space-time is curved around mass. Even light follows this curve. Damien is identifying the intermediary rational mind. The agent that makes sense of the world providing the illusion of understanding or ‘meaning’ as he puts it.

Of course some architecture does come from a dimension before mind. As does some art. These works are a kind of projection that somehow transcend their physical limitations. Perhaps the answer is to stop laying grids or trying to control our bodies, and overflow with the unknowable.