As Aaron Betsky wrote in his essay entitled Emptiness on the Range: Western Spaces, “The Jeffersonian grid converted the continent into territory, in which the scale of the whole country specified itself down to states, communities, neighborhoods, farms, building sites, and finally into rooms within each balloon frame structure. America became the Descartian Eden, where every aspect of reality presented itself as a grid, from the street to the room, from the social space of the town square to the furrowed land.

“The undulations of geography, the vagaries of discovery, and the peculiarities of site disappeared below this invented spatiality… Most fundamentally, the grid meant that all the world was developable. Fallow land became unfulfilled space, waiting only to give up its potential within a gridded reality. . . The land was waiting to become either a furrowed field or a home site, the basis for either transformation or superimposition.”