Scattered Work

Silence and Void

In 2008, Anjali Gupta, then editor of Art Lies, asked me to write a feature on the relationship between John Cage and Buckminster Fuller. I certainly wasn’t an expert on Cage, and hardly knew anything about Fuller. I dug through what I had, bought some books, and sent many queries to Google. I ended up writing Silence and Void: Cage, Fuller, and Urban Space, tracking the two thinkers’ similar philosophical foundations and ultimate divergence, concluding with:

[Cage] had come to believe that harmonically structured, emotionally fraught music could live alongside formless, chance-based compositions. Meanwhile, at the time that Cage gave this interview, Fuller was still railing against the failings of Bauhaus architects. With this in mind, we can see why Fuller’s vision of the future, in some ways, missed the mark. While the increasing availability of inexpensive travel and communication has certainly changed the way our society functions, it has not changed the human need for shared social space. Fuller’s Dymaxion house disregarded the socioeconomic and emotional aspects of urban architecture in favor of lightness, portability and conservation of materials. The idea of rootedness might have had little interest to a man who constantly moved about the world. But the ability to move freely and communicate over long distances has never displaced our need for stable social space any more than the ability to appreciate chance sounds has diminished the enjoyment of structured music.

While I was writing this essay, I was also exploring the south side of downtown San Antonio, riding my bike by vacant buildings transforming into architecture offices and condos. Living among these developments while reading about urban space and structural principles sparked an interest that I haven’t been able to shake.

Later, reading Jane Jacobs, I became more deeply aware of the importance of “stable social space.” While criticizing New York’s destruction of “blighted” neighborhoods in the 50s, Jacobs eloquently demonstrates the value of social networks for promoting safety, well-being, and general civic responsibility. When the neighborhood is destroyed, and the inhabitants scattered, the social fabric is disrupted with far-reaching consequences. This is the familiar argument against gentrification. In San Antonio, we’ve seen this happen with the construction the Victoria Courts in the 1940s, HemisFair in 1968, and the Alamodome in 1993, to name a few of the most well-known displacement projects.

Jacobs spilled a lot of ink railing against government intervention in neighborhoods that, though perhaps poor, are safe and functional. Certainly some of this displacement had a racist motivation, as the black community was pushed steadily to the east side, in the case of San Antonio (although San Antonio is less segregated than many cities, as can be seen in these fascinating “race maps” of American cities). Despite all this, city planners are, of course, capable of doing good things.

So the question becomes: How can we, as a city, allow the aleatory to live alongside the structured? Or better, how can we create structures, like Cage did, that allow us to see the beauty in the unstructured decisions of each individual?

Tags: Alamodome, Buckminster Fuller, downtown, gentrification, HemisFair, Jane Jacobs, John Cage, racism, social networks