I know that almost nobody thinks that grids are quirky.  Probably nobody at all.  Will you hear me out?  Will you keep an open mind?

When I was a boy, I loved the grids that I could make with Kenner’s Girder and Panel, a building set toy.

The little dovetail pieces of the orange horizontal girders tended to snap off when you locked them into the notches of the vertical girders, but you could play all day with this.  Making mid-century modern (who knew?) grids with glass curtain exteriors.  Seagram Building!  I am Mies Van Der Rohe!

My thought as I observed and photographed and inventoried Berkeley grids was – train the eye, see things that you usually miss, and take photos that when presented as a whole will be a quirky quilt of Berkeley grids.

First, photos of big building grids –

And then the not quite as big, but still griddy grids:

I have more grid photos – fence grids and grids-with-circles – but I think that I will wait until the demand rises for them.

As for these photos, well, in closing – how about those grids?  Aren’t they fun?  Aren’t they quirky?  Or not?

I have commissioned some sophisticated polling about the grids-as-quirky notion.  Pretty much this is what the polling told me:

Dang!

I stood up and made the speech of my lifetime.

I turned in desperation to my friend.  He might be the only one who will think these grids are quirky.  “These squares are far out,” he said.   I asked for further explanation.  He said:

P.S.  My friend blurts out musical lyrics if they arguably fit the situation.  After looking at this page, he stroked his beard and said to me, “Dude, confusion has its cost.”  I asked what he was talking about.  “Girders and Panels. Grids.  Girder.  Grid.  Not the same word, bro!”  I know.  I made grids with the girders.  That’s all.  But I thanked him for his thought.  And was a little surprised that he even picked up the -ir- -ri- thing.  And then i threw a musical lyric of my own back at him – “Once in a while you get shown the light / in the strangest of places if you look at the right.”  He smiled.