Trotsky wrote that Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International gave “an impression of scaffolding which someone has forgotten to take away.” Though never built, it remained a structure for future intellectual dialogue.

Typographer Erik Spiekermann begins drawing each new typeface within a rough grid. The grid itself is not the font; it is the construction behind the typeface, invisibly demonstrating how it is built. Like scaffolding, the grid holds the definite qualities of a typeface within a provisional structure.

Groombridge's oeuvre functions more as temporary frameworks for sets of ideas rather than the products of such. He relies on visual demonstrations of marking and quantifying, consciously avoiding signification. He often calls upon structure and measurement to give the suggestion that ideas are being worked on. Invested with this logic of potential, the repeating components of the work maintain both its specificity and expandability. In some dd/mm/yyyy pieces, there's an attempt to describe undeliverable space, the distance between two fixed points. His work evocatively uses space as a quantity.