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.
Current architectural and urban theory argues that there exists a physically continuous urban plane, which experiences temporal discontinuities. The urban continuum shifts. However, disconnections exist in the physical continuity as well; they are cut by infrastructure. Within these cuts lies the Zero Street, a fragment of history that has been erased. The Zero Street is representative of the environmental and moral degradation that the cut has engendered.
In order to reconstitute a comprehensive urban fabric a methodology must be developed for the Zero Street. A reconnection will be accomplished by the opposing strategies of extrapolation and resistance. The development of an element that deals with inevitable change is also required. Therefore, 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.
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