STREET SCHEMA (3)

By: Joshua Glenn
April 5, 2024

One in a miniseries of posts — within SCHEMATIZING — via which Josh Glenn will share photos of manhole covers, the diagrammatic design of which he sometimes finds useful to his thinking — in his role as a consulting semiotician — about how to diagram a “semiosphere.” (Here’s an example of Josh’s proprietary “G-schema”; it appeared in his 2021 book The Adventurer’s Glossary, from McGill-Queen’s University Press). Josh is grateful to Rob Walker’s Art of Noticing provocations.

Don’t think I paid attention to this one at the time! But when I search my photos for “manhole,” there it is — underfoot, in a photo I snapped of Max and Diana in San Juan. Manhole covers are everywhere, is the point.

The design of this one is attractive — the radiating squares. Very Modernist. However, as we’ve already discussed, I’m not particularly inspired by circular schemas that have a center from which all else radiates….

I am interested, however, in the fact that there’s an inner circle, here, which seems to rotate independently of the outer circle. Which suggests that two aspects of a semiosphere — an inner and outer aspect — can relate to one another in various ways. Not an infinite variety of ways, though — since each aspect is rigidly structured. Hmmm.

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STREET SCHEMA (3)

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