UNINTENTIONAL TEXTURES

“The sound experience which I prefer to all others is the experience of silence, and the silence almost everywhere in the world now is traffic... If you listen to Beethoven or Mozart you see that they are always the same, if you listen to traffic you see that it is always different.”

-John Cage

Urban architecture exists in a field of fluid change between capital, material, energy and people. It is always both subject and object transmitting and receiving movements that become permanent form. Projects that map or a record city constructs, in time become a collection of non-referential memories re-sampled or discarded, piled up and reinterpreted. Cities constantly change while architecture acts like cooled glass with a liquid memory. If the only consistent rhythm is difference, then the only rationale is to compose the unintentional.

In The 49 waltzes for the Five Burroughs John Cage composed a score that sampled sounds throughout the city as they are, creating, as he would say, a sculpture which remains. The score is a map of New York City superimposed with points and lines indicating 49 locations and durations of sounds sampled throughout the city. The points and lines, selected by chance, do not indicate notes or rhythms, but rather “invite listeners to consider the sounds and textures that exist naturally in the city. The finished project combines sounds into an intriguing, nostalgic rumination on the diverse vibrations of urban life as an unintentional music made by people, birds, planes, automobiles, police and fire sirens, and countless other debris of sounds; forcing one to accept their ordinariness.”

Then to think would always be to construct, to build a free plan in which to move, invent concepts, unfold a drama. Making a philosophy would become a matter of architecture in the way a novel, a painting, or a piece of music is, where the plan of construction must be always built anew, since it is never given in advance through a system or underlying rules. Philosophies would become free, impermanent constructions superimposed on one another like strata in a city. John Rajchman, Constructions