In 1807 Simeon deWitt, Governeur Morris and John Rutherford are commissioned to design the model that will regulate the „final and conclusive“ occupancy of Manhattan. Four years later they propose (...) 12 avenues running north-south and 155 streets running east-west. With that simple action they describe a city of 13 X 156 = 2,028 blocks (excluding topographical accidents): a matrix that captures, at the same time, all remaining territory and all future activity on the island. The Manhattan Grid. The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan’s builders to develop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another. (...) The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos (...) In the single block - the largest possible area that can fall under architectural control - it develops a maximum unit of urbanistic Ego. (...) Since all Manhattan blocks are identical and emphatically equivalent in the unstated philosophy of the Grid, a mutation in a single one affects all others as a latent possibility: theoretically, each block can now turn into a self-contained enclave of the Irresistible Synthetic. That potential also implies an essential isolation: no longer does the city consist of a more or less homogeneous texture - a mosaic of complementary urban fragments - but each block is now alone like an island, fundamentally on its own. Manhattan turns into a dry archipelago of blocks. Quotes from Rem Koolhaas: Delirious New York, 001 Publishers Rotterdam 1994