Grids, arguably the simplest form of fractals, have been indispensable to the project of planning in architecture. Blueprints, plans, and even conceptual layouts, especially past modernism, owe a slight bit of their conception to grids. While commonly perceived in the orthogonal plane, several ancient and contemporary metropolises across the world employ an architectural grid— whether radial, linear, or even modular—for planning exercises across scales. From urban planning, to municipal services, property and land allocation, street layouts, and even individual residences and spaces, the rather simplistic yet intersectional tool of superimposition has been central to the act of planning in architecture. It speaks to a certain fundamentalism while alluding to order. Situating itself at a contested middle ground between sacred and mathematical, between city and desk organisation, the grid contracts and expands to suit scales. It may not be too farfetched to hover around the conclusion of a ‘plan’—both in the architectural and work sense—coming to fruition in alignment with the framework of a grid. In that, the grid’s close, near indispensable association with the most direct proponent of modern architecture—industry—comes to the fore in Hanoi-based Ad Hoc Practice’s eponymous project. In its ground-up transformation of a rundown but sizeable train factory, the Vietnamese architectural practice explores everything from a “transient urbanism” to archaeology and temporality in architecture. The result is a startingly minimal industrial corsage that dwells on detail while emerging as a fine example of applying theory to practice.

‘The Grid’ doubles up on the idea of industrial architecture and remnants of machinic production sites lending themselves readily to spaces for display of art and design programming. It is the kind of adaptive reuse that appears to be the most didactic interpretation of both, and here too, grids are essential to that sort of transference and spatial formulation. As a project and a process, ‘The Grid’ allowed the architects to delve into a larger urban picture that encapsulates transience in the face of such an architectural transformation backed by an underlying dictatorial framework—the grids—along with its ramifications upon Vietnam’s own industrial heritage, part colonial and part home-grown, thriving amidst and concurrently within dense urban pockets.

“It invites and encourages a critical examination of construction methods, retrofitting processes, and the future potential of the site through collaborative efforts involving the local community”, state the architects in an official note while commenting on the many things that ‘The Grid’ seeks to achieve even in its limited architectonic or constructional scope. Trung Mai, the chief architect at Ad Hoc Practice, states how he dabbled with the idea of a “transient urbanism” or a transitory one in the project, viewing the transformation of the rail factory into an exhibition space as the summation, the crystallisation of an ongoing process. That process itself sought a certain permanence within the temporary and temporal flux, with the architects self-assuredly claiming that the new space could potentially serve as a manifesto “against prevailing contemporary construction practices that prioritise speed and mass production per capita volume over the preservation of the city’s rich industrial legacy.” The ethos of the design thus, they state, was to have the erstwhile industrial structure embody an environment that, at the same time, not only preserved a significant industrial heritage but also, through adaptation and establishing continuity in the architectural narrative, acknowledged its evolution and morphosis.

For the architects, the grid is further symbolic of equality and the socialist principles of Vietnam as a nation and as a diverse but unified socio-cultural ecosystem. That is, of course, apart from the efficiency of circulation and production that grids afford, that was the very basis of the values that fostered a shift to modern industrial production in the first place. Going back to the theory of fractals, the grids constituting the display spaces work on multiple scales, from the larger structural grid of the existing industrial shed to the smaller grids of the metal grating used in the flooring, further extending to the vertical plane as display panels, in a further bout of unification of architectural and visual language.

A curious academic reference that ‘The Grid’ draws from is Michael Schiffer’s ‘Behavioral Archaeology’ which links human behaviour and artefacts, or a broadly defined material culture that bears a certain specificity to time and place. In recreating the industrial edifice of the Gia Lam train factory, the architects relegated it to an “archaeological site” that was defined by its interactions with people, thus being reflective of a distinct urban imagery linked to the place. Ad Hoc practice, near pedantic in their approach, had no inhibitions in terming this elevation of site to be of a “memorial status”; a memorial to a bygone industrial era and its monuments perhaps, which may be all but slightly misplaced as a notion in our current epoch of reeling for maximal industrial exploitation. Likewise and in a similar vein, questions of context loom large over this intervention. While the new exhibition space speaks to a broader proliferation beyond its confines about the multiplicity of such spaces and the effective adaptive reuse of industrial buildings, it also seeks to level the supposed sans context allegations against modernist-industrial structures. The processes, theories, and physical acts involved in the construction are supposedly to subvert and transcend the relative hostility associated with industry and to establish it as a bona fide heritage. It seeks to harbour a rather profound sense of belonging to a veritable past and a transient present while seeking to solidify its position in an uncertain future.