Crumbling Land:
The Erosion of the Jeffersonian Grid

Diploma 4, Architectural Association, 2020
Location: The American Midwest
Tutors: John Palmesino, Ann-Sofi Rönnskog

The Jeffersonian Grid is the modus operandi for urbanization across North America. For the past two centuries this system of rectilinear roads and property divisions has simplified a vast stretch of the Earth’s surface into a reliable mechanism of extraction and representation. After centuries of expansion, the continuous connectivity of the Jeffersonian Grid is beginning to erode and atrophy under the pressures of climate change, stagnating investment in maintenance, and fatigue of the materials which compose it. The project explores withdrawal from, and abandonment of, roads and cultivated land to manage the declining maintenance and failure of overextended infrastructure networks of the United States created by the Grid.