Zero Streets: Temporal Extractions and the Space of Erasure

The zero street sits in the space under the freeway. This space is dead, and has been for some time. It has been packed with storage facilities, parking lots, and debris, but nothing much for living things. There is no real reason to engage this dead space. It is loud with the blare of passing traffic, trucks and trains, layered in the grit of industrial and automotive particulate pollution, and its air choked with dangerous gasses.

How can architecture begin to reclaim the space of erasure created by freeways? How can such reclamation begin to allow for a comprehensive urban landscape?

The answer necessarily deals with questions of memory, marginalization, and change over time.

The Zero Street offers an access point into the wasteland, and avenue for architectural extractions. A Zero Street contains properties that have been zeroed out in public databases. Widths, lengths, sidewalks, and addresses appear as zeros, representing erasure. Fragments of the erased streets remain, abandoned to collect debris and detritus. Traces of these fragments can be found in geographic databases and maps.

Architecture must be drawn directly out of the existing environment, building on the palimpsest, capitalizing on the zero. Architecture must adapt to the temporal and recurrent character of the space of erasure. The constructed manifestation of these principles will exist between temporal and permanent, local and global, unique and nonspecific. It will adapt to variations over time, within a repetitive framework.

UC Berkeley Architecture School Thesis

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[jweinrub]

Very, very, very intriguing!!! Seriously, this is very interesting indeed.