The past few months at the magazine have been taken up with what is, on the whole, a mundane exercise: dreaming under pressure. My colleague Lisa Tronca and I tried to envision the organization’s future between the lines of the grant forms and to translate our ambitions into a series of numbers in columns. The grid, in this bureaucratic spreadsheet format, is intended as a tool to clarify our aspirations and, above all, to demonstrate their cost-effectiveness. Our activist stances and passionate discussions were thus smoothed over by a formidable yet simple interface, trading complex thought for yield, and passion for calculation.

Montréal’s built environment also complies with this optimization imperative, specifically through the use of the grid. Place Ville-Marie, with its glass-and-steel curtain-wall facades, is emblematic of this effort to rationalize architecture, to make it “legible” by emphasizing lines and stripping the space of all ornamentation. The poet Alisha Dukelow has dedicated a book of poems to this topic (Modernist Affect Grid, Centre for Expanded Poetics and Anteism, 2022), in which she explores the influence of the cybernetic metaphor on the building’s architects, Henry Cobb and I. M. Pei. Like a state-of-the-art machine, the building complex was designed to improve the flow of traffic, encourage consumption, and facilitate the surveillance of people moving through its long, open and austere hallways. Nothing about this skyscraper was left to chance; it was prophetically described as a

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