the technical and the social

The Fifth Ward Project attempts an explicit link between a "subject position" and the form of a routine street infrastructure. This link will be identified as the characteristic intersection, or "street corner" that lies at the heart of the project's abstractions (switch fields) and the scene of the Ward's most intense social settings. The street intersection is the locus of the technical and the social that animates the project.
          There are physical points at which infrastructure itself to have a potential that goes far beyond the technical domain. Once again, Bruno Latour's reflection on the classification of things comes to the fore.  It has been some time since modernism defined for (our environmental profession) a series of technical or rational artifacts; since that time, civil engineering has remained for us a simple matter of fact. The limitations of such classification can no longer be denied. Like so many transparent "matters of fact" bequeathed to us by modernism, the common street now becomes a matter of concern.  It is no longer possible to think of such as an urban intersection — where the syntactic world of form meets the semantic world of the social and the technical world of civil engineering — as a simple, transparent "fact." To say the obvious, the technical specifications for the site work of a new urban subdivision does not contain a heading labeled "subjectivity." Yet, undeniably, the street corner is as it sometimes remains the locus of event, particularly in those urban settlements that lack a characteristic density or crowd.
          Can a new subjectivity be created out of the abstractions of point, line, plane and volume?

We begin to think of a formal logic that possesses and emphatic corner condition.

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