An Urban Space Probe Space Probe

Dedicated to the Memory of
Tony Vaughan
1947-2008
Poet, Painter, Musician, Co-Author and Beloved Friend
and
Ted Milikin
1951 - 2005
Photographer, Songwriter, Peaceworker and Beloved Friend

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THE ELEMENTS OF A NEW
EXISTENCE:
An Urban Space Probe
into the fifth dimension

Introduction

M artha Senger, poet, social clairvoyant, action artist,
nonprofit housing developer, alchemical new science
philosopher and scholar, is also a revolutionary activist.

She has been a personal inspiration for at least two generations of artists, politicians, youth and social activists.
Her list of accomplishments make her an important
cultural leader. Founder of the G2 Institute for Integral
Aesthetics, development team coordinator of the
Goodman2 community art/live/work complex, radical
facilitator and trouble-shooter for the defense and evolution of the original Goodman Building in San Francisco,
California, Martha is an insightful futurist. She says: “We
need a rebirth of passion — not as charisma but as wisdom and shared desire.” Her ability to name precise
distinctions and see and illuminate inherent connections
and relationships in social phenomena has informed and
challenged my life and those of some of my closest
friends for decades. Martha, together with numbers of
others, including lawyers, city planners, architects,
artists and community activists — a constellation of
individuals — formed a nexus to succeed in the task of
rebirthing a famous community of artists.

photo by Marion Gray

Martha says: “The artist has abdicated his responsibility. The artist has got to remake the world. The

artist has got to take another role besides that
of being solely an image-maker.” A profound
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The original Goodman
Building, circa. 1978.
Photo: Ted Milikin

Front step of Goodman
Building, 1117 Geary St.
San Francisco.

researcher into possible less restrictive and more
equal worlds, Martha talks about evolution and radical economics as being “...a mystical concept. It’s
participatory, but not in the way you can predict.
Experiments are very important. The Greens have
made immense steps towards the elements of a new
existence. Ecology, new physics, appropriate technology, anarchism. But these are still too simplified.
You cannot talk about something in a dogmatic way.
Poetic dialogue is necessary.”

In the late autumn of 1990 I was invited to do a
series of dialogues with Martha and write them up
for Vox Magazine. We held our conversations in a
number of different cafes, over lunch and after work.
At the time, the non-profit ArtSpace Development
Corporation occupied an office near the corner of
Valencia and 16th Street in San Francisco. The article for Vox was duly completed, but much of the
interview material went unused. At the time the
Goodman2 project was still in blue prints and getting final approvals from The City. Martha had been
working full-time on this, it seemed to me, forever.
From time to time she and I had collaborated on a
number of projects: a film, a group of performance
pieces, participatory art/poetry events, fundraisers
and committee work. In 1990, the following conversation seemed well ahead of the times. I did transcribe the tape. Then I put everything into a box.
The following years saw the miracle accomplishments of the construction of the Goodman2 community art/live/work complex which took advantage of
economical funding strategies, fifth dimensional
architecture and considerable community organizing. A group of artists was chosen by lottery and
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moved in, including five artists from the original

Goodman Building.
At the time of this writing, Goodman2 can consider
itself an embryonic community — it hasn't yet
reached the level of engagement hoped for in this
interview.
Many of us see the building and the entire
Goodman2 project as the development and launch
of a new kind of vehicle that Martha calls an urban
space probe. A powerful resource for a long time
into the future.
Goodman2 opened 1995 on
Potrero Hil, San Francisco.
Photo: David Baker Associates

This interview, partly edited from the tapes we
recorded in September, 1990, and partly expanded to
include new material, some as fresh as to incorporate a bit of her thinking during the present time,
winter, 2007, shows the apt, resonant, wildly beautiful way Martha puts forth a body of ideas, scholarship and poetry, uniquely her own, but also representative of a universal, revolutionary movement.
Tony Vaughan, January, 2007

Interview
Tony: Why is it so hard to create meaningful dialogue
in our society today?
Martha: Because our whole mode of existence is so
split. So deeply pathological. That's the basic fact. How
to depathologize our lives, this is the real ecological
task. To do it, and this is Murray Bookchin writing in his
bookToward An Ecological Society — to do it is to say,
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for God's sake, let us look at the processes of nature!
But in these times there has been a radical displacement of the process of living, of the purpose of living —
which is to live experimentally, and to fully actualize the
potential, the real potential that everybody has. Everybody is uniquely creative. We have to deconstruct the
partition between the artist and the non-artist.
Tony: What's causing the pathology?

The complex
connections of the
back stairs of the

Goodman Building.
photo: Ted Milikin

Martha: The walls themselves — the dominant, hierarchical structures — are the barrier to any kind of authentic existence. The authentic life that only comes from
small, self-determining groups. Complex groups.
Complex because they're interconnected at many levels
and have control of their own environments. But we've
now got to the incredibly dangerous thinning and simplification of life — of human relationships. There's a
phrase I think Lewis Mumford used. He said we are
“down-building our complexity.” The entire culture is
down-building. And as this happens, complexity is downgraded because it is factored out. Then entropy and disorder set in, and if this trend isn’t consciously reversed,
we’re headed for what Gregory Bateson called an evolutionary cul-de-sac.
New ideas come out of people not being falsely separated from one another and from their work. There are two
major areas of separation. Of course, the issue of a person being divorced from the process and product of his
or her own labor goes back to the Industrial Revolution
and the rise of capitalism ... to the beginning of a labor
force that is alienated from its own work. That's why I
feel that live/work is such a — and I've used this term
really thoughtfully — a revolutionary idea.
Tony: Today’s world is primarily centered on immersion

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in the world of corporate fashion, corporate design, getting a good job, being obedient to authority. Not social
evolution.
Martha: But culture could be sharing meaning, not just
trendy information. Sharing the wealth that we, as
human beings, offer each other. That's a free-flowing
kind of process where subject and object no longer are
opposed to one another. Then we move into a synchronous stream of knowing and being. Ecologists and other
systems thinkers have also ferreted out over the last
couple of decades the whole notion of an organism as
being — the whole universe — as being recursive —
self-organizing. All these findings in ecology and new
physics simply corroborate the intuitive understanding of
people, especially artists, of all time. But power structures everywhere disallow the bottom line conditions for
true freedom or culture to arise with their ‘iron cage.’
That's what the sociologist Max Weber called it.
Tony: Culture defines our values and our labor.
Sometimes it can work the other way around.
Informal meeting at the

original Goodman Building
photographer, unknown

Martha: We're still in the grips of that Puritanical notion
that you work — you labor — (this is Lutheran) — you
labor to achieve your salvation. Any departure from that
— the whole guilt around it in the obsessive notion of
work as labor — is what we're still in. It's such a subtle
thing. Because of it we don't have any comfortable
notion in our culture of what work is. We need a redefinition of work. And the artist's work is... you know I’ve just
been going back and reading Marx again. Early on in his
writings — the whole nut where he was coming from
was the exploitation of labor. Because he understood
work as being the identity of a person. And that capital
ripped that off. And sucked a person dry of their very
identity and essence when it stole their labor for a wage
and turned it into a dead thing. Which mysteriously
transformed the thing produced — the commodity —
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into a fetish! A substitute object of desire whose spell we
still haven’t broken.
Tony: What about the will to prestige, power and wealth
in our culture? The superstar musician, painters, novelists, etc.?

Berkeley Barb photo by
Janet Fries

Martha: If you and I devoted our efforts to making
money and not making art, we’d be rich. But that’s not
our goal. It’s not hard to make money. If you're into making money, that’s what you make. You make dead matter. But it takes leisure to live a life — to pick up the
rhythms. It takes time, you have to live it before you can
do art about it. Too often artists look at what they are
producing as being a product to put out there rather than
being radically aware — in almost a Zen sense — only
more formal — that their life is a protohuman life. It’s
these lives the world needs to see — not the products.
Forget the products. What is life? What is existence?
Joseph Beuys talked about art as social sculpture —
about democratic connectivity and process being the

sine qua non of creativity.
This almost leaps ahead of the radical truth of what is a
philosophical question. Before we can solve any problems we have to find out — what is the problem of being
human? And what is human? Is there a design in
nature? What is the place of history? Of mind? And
work? If we're to go beyond postmodern irony and pastiche we must re-ask ourselves these questions —
questions about the possible form of a new way of life —
or we're heading for a new dark age.
I remember Marcia Kimmell talked about the Goodman
Building being ‘all stars.’ Everybody who lived there was
a star. I think one of the things that frightens people
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away from the notion of community is that it's going to
average everything down. But the experience of the
Goodman Building was just the opposite. In fact Sartre
said “The group-in-fusion is the resurrection of free
dom.” So the notion of community is for the sake of
community — but it comes about through empowering
each individual’s own expressive needs. The eros of the

interchange is so alive — so wild...
Tony: Wild?
Martha: Truly. I just remember a thing I wrote about in
my storefront installation — Goodman Engage. Living
and working at the building was an epiphany experience
of becoming aware of our historical existence. And the
awareness that it was — I don't want to use the word
“ordained” — it gives the wrong sense to it — but it was
a radical participation in a world-wide movement — an
historical drama actually. The decisions we made at the
building were so literally cutting-edge. We were doing
the most impossible kinds of actions together. And it
would be dangerous at times — especially had we not
been aware that we were functioning from an ideal,
archetypal base. Our revolution was about doing and
preserving a beautiful way of living. And not just to preserve it but to let it flower. Life becoming truly manifest
— in a kind of awe. It was like being caught up in a
superconductive state — again reading in physics this
really fascinating idea — where particles come into
phase with one another — it’s described as a ‘change
of state.’ That was the feeling I had at the original
Goodman Building. There was that sense of dramatic,
phased coordination that was totally spontaneous — a
feeling of being choreographed by the archetypes we'd
evoke at our gatherings. Of being drawn together by a
shared idea that’'s circling around itself — like a torus.
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Always speaking from the deepest place. Whether one
was being pissed off at somebody — or at some situation. But working through all that we phased our thinking.
Tony: One of the important points you make is that the
power found in collective participation can also deepen
the individual person. We cannot have a profoundly individual, democratic person unless the overall situation,
the group, the community, neighborhoods, personal
relationships are deepened.

Niccolo Caldararo
and other Goodman
artists at the old
Foster’s coffeehouse
on Van Ness and
Geary near the
original Goodman
Building.
photographer
unknown

Martha: A good example of such a person would be
Niccolo Caldararo, who lived in the building during the
time we were beginning to organize ourselves. Nick
was, without question, the charismatic visionary who
was responsible for inspiring a loose assortment of
artists to rise up as a group and resist Redevelopment’s
takeover of the building so it might become a vehicle for
our liberation, and the liberation of others. It was Nick
who led the group to incorporate itself as the Goodman
Group, Inc., secure legal defense, and then work with
our attorneys to build a case against eviction and relocation as individuals and our right to be relocated as a
group based on the collective nature of our work and our
first amendment right to assemble! Then it was he who
first moved to ‘liberate’ the storefronts — the first event
was a free film festival — and turn them into the neighborhood art center they became. Nick had been a student
of Paul Goodman at San Francisco State. He wrote the
following in an early in-house communication: “We've
saved The Goodman for the present and plan to use it
as our base to turn the tide of creation versus destruction in our community. It is a classroom without walls.
Our tools are culture, and humanity is gasping.” Another
quote I have here is from a manifesto he wrote: “We see
ourselves as politically or socially aware artists.
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As art is both an expression of culture and of intellect, of
origins, environment and individual experience — we
cannot ignore our place in society, nor evade our
responsibility to effect the march of events in our time.
As artists are students and fabricators of culture, so we
must protect the positive value of the creations of the
past and forge the vision and the arrival of the future.”
A gathering to plan
extended community use
of the Goodman Building
funded by the National
Endowment for the Arts.

Tony: You gave me a list of quotations to look at. One
I found very interesting is what the experimental/experiential
architect Paolo Soleri says: “The return to nature is about
the opposite of what it is pictured to be. It is the rediscovery
of congruence between the part and the whole.”

Photo: Ted Milikin

Martha: Yes. And without it the structure of things —
the evolutionary vector in fact — falls apart. Which is
what our explosive materialism is causing to happen.
According to Soleri — and in this he's in agreement with
Teilhard de Chardin — evolution is a complexifying
process that synthesizes parts into wholes — a spiraling
movement that compresses, complexity emerging as
entropy gets cut away. This process continues until we
get the message of how it happens — how it's structured and our role in the process. At this moment, of
seeing and synchronizing with it — and with the image
of unity or wholeness that keeps it turning — the evolutionary curve will double back on itself and shift to a
higher state — to the harmonic convergence Chardin
predicted.
Artist Byron Hunt at his studio at
the Goodman Building
photo: Mark Green

But despite this radical shift in “how knowing is done”—
that's Bateson's description of this new epistemology —
the old dualisms hang on. The top down order — the
patriarchy — is so fearful of matter — of chaos — that it
continues to repress difference as it has for centuries.
So it continues on its linear path — repeating the same
thing over and over — disallowing anything that would
10

upset that equilibrium and cause it to reflect or, God forbid, deconstruct. So they keep what doesn't conform
from coming together, from forming itself. By blowing it
up in ever increasing bits. In wars — and on Wall Street.

A view of the Victorian
façade of the original
Goodman Building.
This photograph helped
establish the building’s
architectural significance
as a Landmark of the
City and County of San
Francisco.
photo: Ted Milikin

Original resident Ken Richardson
teaching a children’s theatre class
at the original building.
photographer unknown

To show how this vector of evolution could be put back
together Soleri built Arcosanti — an architectural experiment in the Arizona desert he designed to rebuild complexity. A ‘thick ecology’ that would situate individuals
within a rich mix of things and events that could recohere what at the system has split apart. Which is what
the original Goodman did too.
Tony: Goodman2 will be a descendant of the original
Goodman Building. The original Goodman Building really
served the entire San Francisco arts community in multitudes of ways with its theater, studios, galleries, print
shops and the many art and educational programs residents created to serve The City. As an artist, I found
many resources there. Even more important, I discovered that I was valued as a resource. During the last 20
years, the many freely evolving arts communities such
as the Goodman Building have been destroyed. Could
you talk a little more about this?
Martha: We lost all the old Western Addition in the seventies. The Fillmore district there had been a very alive
community and neighborhood. Besides homes there
were drugstores, delicatessens, cafes, bars, churches,
small businesses — jazz clubs. I remember one in particular — Minnie's Can Do. There was that rich fabric. It
had developed slowly — rich connections — the complexity that's basically the stuff of human culture. Until
urban development came and colonized it. Residents
were literally ripped out and scattered willy nilly — ‘relocated’ — how I hate that word! — to hopelessly sterile
housing projects that were really just barracks. Built for
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one reductionist function without a clue as to the rich
environment — the diverse ecology — that people need
just to survive, let alone flourish.

Repair party at the
Goodman Building.
photo:Ted Milikin

So instead of tearing them down like’s starting to happen, I suggest working with residents on how to enliven
them. Like turning units that have been boarded up into
shared work and cultural production spaces that could
generate income and culture at the same time. Like
recording studios. Or training and production spaces in
video and electronic media. Or an on-site jazz club or
restaurant. A bakery maybe — and food producing gardens. Plus a library and meeting areas. The possibilities
are endless. And potentially — possibly even profoundly
— renewing.
It boggles my mind how environmentalists can talk about
restoring habitats for wildlife when the urban habitat of
humans is so degraded and in such dire need of resuscitation! How blind we've become — and distracted! by
all the unreal glitz — the phony signs.

Poster by Goodman
resident artist David
Richardson.
photo:Ted Milikin

As to artist's live/work spaces — there was the famous
Monkey Block that was torn down in the sixties to build
something quite the opposite — the Transamerica
Pyramid. Later other artist's projects like Project One
and Project Two also got lost to non-arts development.
Then in the seventies the International Hotel became the
focus of a famous housing struggle. There, too, people
managed to really poetically express the magic of the
community they shared and how their lives in that large
building were able to function on many levels. Like the
Goodman Building, the International Hotel had many
storefronts and served a wide community. It was an
important living system and culture. Torn down in the
late seventies it was a real tragedy.
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Over the years these habitats for artists became an
obstacle to the system because they were living examples of communities that didn't need products, they didn't
need commodities, they lived simply and had their own
creative and cultural wealth. And most annoying, they
occupied buildings that could be ‘developed’ more profitably. So bit by bit they were destroyed, the artists evicted and the buildings converted or knocked down —
struggles that were very similar to the Goodman
Building.
San Francisco Bay
Guardian centerfold
article supporting
the Goodman Building
tenant’s struggle.
photos: Ted Milikin

By pushing low income artists out of The City through
high-end development projects — you lose an entire
strata of human consciousness, which is access to the
visionary. That in interaction with other different perspectives is a very healthy mix for The City. But if you eradicate any level of the mind of a complex organism like a
city you drive it crazy — literally insane.
Tony: Evicting the subjective. That's what you talk about.
Martha: It's evicting half the mind of the polis. So there
is not an opportunity to discuss just what our needs are,
our aspirations, or our ability to plan together to construct our cities so they meet buried agendas, dreams
that have been pushed down by the veneer of civilization. Without those multilevel dialogues you've just basically got the left brain talking to itself. Gregory Bateson
is brilliant on this. He says what's deadly is cutting the
circuitry of the mind — the circuit that connects the
brain's conscious knowledge with the unconscious
knowing of the body. And that we must restore this ‘pattern that connects’ — which he defines as beauty.
Something we actually saw happening in a very dramatic way in the public dialogues about the Goodman
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Poster by Goodman Building
artist Ellen Gilroy.

Building. Because they brought into the public arena not
only the expression of our subjective needs but the
whole City’s in the process! In looking into why we didn’t
want to lose the building, we looked into our own psyches to see what the building provided in terms of an
environment for a full kind of all-stops-out living. People
came to understand that and to resonate with why we
wanted to save the interior of an old residential hotel. As
one landmarks commissioner said: “This building is
alive!” So it gave us a chance to really talk abut it in
detail. And through our public hearings and press
accounts of the issues over the years others in The City,
including the bureaucracy, got to do the same. We articulated needs that have been kept out by the walls that
separate the different functions of life. We were speaking from this deep place. Got to see and weigh the very
different values that were at stake in our struggle. In
making these comparisons I saw we were moving
against entropy — by creating a more complex structure in people’s minds. Rebuilding true significance in a
realm of empty signs.
Tony: That’s why so many people got involved. Not
only those who lived there. But others. We participated.

Photo celebrating City’s decision
to designate the Goodman
Building a San Francisco
Landmark.
photo: Ted Milikin.

Martha: Which points to a notion of the political that’s
very different from the usual cynical assessment,
because the political was transformed for us into the circumstances — the medium really — for articulating an
alternative reality and defending it like we did at hearings. Which turned these encounters into a true polis.
And so those accepted definitions of what's art and
what’s political, what’s personal and what’s social were
no longer separated into the incredibly painful, distorted
and unnatural fragments they’re usually believed to be.

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What we were doing was theater on a public stage. That
was the idea behind the installation I did in our storefront
windows —The Goodman Building is Art Engagé.
Tony: I also remember many spontaneous group activities, art actions, symposiums, poetry readings, performances at the building. A whole summer project for youth.
Life there as an adventure of creativity and community
development.

Photos of the Goodman
Building storefront theatre.
photo: Ted Milikin

Cover of National
Endowment for the Arts
study to save the
Goodman Building for
continued use by the
arts.
photo: Ted Milikin

Martha: You remember that after Redevelopment got
control of the building the five commercial tenants in the
storefronts moved out expecting it would soon be demolished. So we turned them into galleries, and workshops,
classrooms and rehearsal spaces. And a theater that
over the years housed several great companies.
Building artists — painters, sculptors, actors and writers
— worked on productions in the theater making sets,
doing lighting and writing scripts. Plus as you know the
whole time we were creating strategies for saving the
building. Getting it declared a City Landmark, then
placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to do
repair work that the Agency just kept turning away.
Plus having a feasibility study done with a grant from the
NEA that they later gave a prize. And of course during this
time we formed Goodco — our own nonprofit development corporation — that put a plan together to buy and
rehab the building. We even got a grant to retrofit the
building with alternative energy systems! And amazingly,
people’s art work flourished through all this — with support
from the Group which met every Monday night for ten years!
It was this that kept the whole thing sane and centered
throughout the incredible mix of activities and changes over
the years. It was the Group that provided the self-ordering of
this experimental chaos — the meaning vortex that sorted
15

Goodman Building
storefront window
installation
of photos of murals
by Aaron Miller.
photo: Ted Milikin

Photo of bulldozing of
Aaron Miller murals by SF
Redevelopment Agency
photo: Ted Milikin

through and analyzed the total flow as it happened.
Integrating what people felt should be kept and discarding what didn't fit or work. New ideas and solutions
poured in and out in an astonishing and coherent flow. We
had hit on a formula for recohering life. That’s why we
fought so hard to save it. And why when we lost it we've
worked so long to come up with a similar form in the hope
it will create fire again.
Tony: When I first met you in the early 70’s you were
working on a project: Aaron Apocalypt: Acts Of Passage.
Part of this project involved driving a flatbed truck
around and through The City with a musical/poetic performance going on. It was about some murals ...
Martha: It was a protest connected with the destruction
of several extraordinary murals in a black church in the
Western Addition that was bulldozed by the Redevelopment Agency. At the time it seemed critical to call attention to this fact. To see the storyline that ran through
the economic and political rationales alongside the
spiritual/aesthetic value of these murals. To connect their
destruction to the fragmenting of our lives seemed to be
a very important piece of cultural information.
Tony: As an activist you've been very involved in these
issues for a long time. You were even arrested during
the eviction of the community at the International Hotel.

Martha Senger’s street
theater performance,
Aaron Apocalypt: Acts
of Passage
photo: Tom Heinze

Martha: I was the only person arrested at the
International Hotel. It was a kind of fluke. The radical
community there had put a human bodyguard around
the hotel of about three people thick. Starting at around
midnight it remained for many, many hours. The sheriff’s
deputies didn’t arrive until about 3 a.m. I had gone back
16

Photo of International
Hotel before it was
demolished in 1978.
Photographer
unknown.

to the Goodman Building to get a little sleep. Byron Hunt
heard on the radio that the deputies and riot police had
begun pulling people out of the building. I got up, called
a cab, and got within two blocks of the International
Hotel. There was a police line all around the building,
the whole block. I attempted to run through the police
line. They grabbed me and told me I wasn’t allowed to
go in there. So — when their backs were turned — I
tried to run through again. Then they arrested me.
Picked me up bodily and threw me into the back of a
paddy wagon. I thought many more would join me. I
looked through the bars at the hotel. I thought I could
see flames but they were searchlights. I could hear cops
yelling. I thought they were arresting a bunch of people.
But no!
Tony: The officials chose to beat up people instead —
but not to arrest them. So you were the only one they
arrested.

Rubble from International
Hotel.
Photographer unknown.

Martha: I was the only one out there. Finally they took
off and drove to the Hall of Justice. I remember the truck
went down into the basement. I could see through the
bars there were all these tables lined up around this big
room. Officials were all sitting at the tables with papers
and lights were on in this kind of dark room, waiting for a
whole bunch ...
Tony: But you were the only person?
Martha: Right. It was really very funny. They came
around and opened the back door to the paddy wagon. I
stepped down and raised my fist and said “Victory to the
International Hotel!” And everybody cracked up! I was
processed. Charged. Information was taken down. I
went through this line by myself.
17

Tony: I saw a filmclip recently. The police really
attacked. They were very violent. But they didn't arrest
anybody else.
Martha: The reason they didn’t take them in was they
didn't want to fuel a long protest. It would have kept the
struggle alive and created martyrs. As it was they only
had one. Jerry Roberts of The Chronicle was the only
person from the press who knew I had been arrested.
Then they dropped the charges.
Photo from San Francisco
Chronicle by Eric Luse

Martha Senger speaking at
the eviction.
photo: Maya Cain

Members of San Francisco
Redevelopment Agency at a
hearing on the Goodman
Building.
photo: Maya Cain

Tony: This brings us to the obvious question about how
you experienced the long-dreaded eviction from the
Goodman Building, an event that threatened to happen
at any time over a span of 10 years of your life. The
eviction in 1983 was something in the back of all of our
minds, those of us who lived there, had lived there or
believed in the project in one or many of its facets —
would this eviction ever happen, and if it did, would it be
violent or peaceful? Would the community relocate in a
satisfactory way?
Martha: I made a short 8mm film on the eviction that
showed the press conference, the trucks hauling people's things away, a photo of me in front of a door they
axed when they came through the building to clear it out
with our poster still hanging on it — you know the one
with the fisheye photo of the building that Ted Miliken
took with a bunch of us gathered out in front. They
washed away the “no eviction” sign we’d painted on a
window overlooking Geary Street. In my film I said: “they
erased our words but they can't erase our deed — it is
etched on more than glass.” With only a few hours to get
our things out, I packed all my things into boxes and
took them to one of those storage places, then went to
Margo St. James’ house in Marin where I camped out in
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San Francisco Mime Troupe
supporting Goodman
Building residents at time of
the eviction.
photo: Maya Cain

Martha Senger talking
with poet — laureate
Lawrence Ferlinghetti at
the eviction.
photo: Maya Cain

her yard for several days — then moved into a room
behind Marcia Kimmell’s theater on Mission Street
where I stayed for about a year. Though, as I think of it,
I never really left the building at all because it remained
alive and well in my imagination and of course we continued to dream about it, and fight to get it back from the
developer legally. You remember he was the art book
dealer/developer the Redevelopment Agency designated
to develop the building after he'd co-opted our NEA
study and architectural plans — promising to work with
us. It demonstrated a low cost, low impact way to save
the building. We had financing committed from The
State. But the Agency didn’t want our ‘more with less’
prototype. So they turned us down and gave it to this
for-profit developer who got a five million dollar HUD
subsidy for literally eviscerating the building — a ‘development’ that split the Goodman's wholeness into privatized apartments — atomized parts. It was an incredible
injustice. And a terrible waste of scarce housing subsidies on a project that didn't need them at all. Allan
Temko, the architectural critic who'd helped us get landmark status wrote: “Now that the building is to be saved,
are we to lose everything we fought for?” Don Terner,
who was head of the State Department of Housing said
to reporters at our eviction ceremony — “This is craziness. You are watching madness.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti
was there. And Sheriff Hennessy. And the Mime Troupe
with its drums.
But they'd had to evict us because our struggle and the
values it raised had started a protest movement that
grew in the end to thousands. So the Goodman had to
be sealed off and our fluctuation damped before it
spread any further and undermined their controls —their
grids on The City 's soul. This orgasm of expansion
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has rightly been called the hyperreal — where insides
are strangely disappeared and only facades are saved.

Drawing by Goodman Bldg. artist
David Richardson

Sketched by Martha Senger
in a dream state

Such is the bureaucracy’s resolve to disallow any unconventional development. Over the past three decades
over 80 percent of the black families have been forced
from their homes in San Francisco's Western Addition
with promises of relocation are still waiting. This is urban
renewal as black removal. And removal now of nearly all
the City's low income residents — including its artists.
Because we’d been promised a half million dollars from
the State if our nonprofit development plan was accepted, The City gave us that amount to acquire another
one. We tried first to find an existing building but none
had the complexity we were looking for so we decided to
build from scratch. With two housing wizards at the
helm, Brad Paul and Steve Taber, we found additional
financing and partnered with a market rate developer we
knew and trusted and his architect to build Goodman2.
It had to be structured like a torus to allow for an open
evolution of ideas. As I’ve said it was the vortically
shaped movement of meaning in time I detected in our
dialogues that drew me away from painting to what I've
come to call ‘aesthetic bootstrapping’ — a doublespiraled form I'd first seen in a dream in the sixties then
read about in a book I’d found on Polk Street called
The Geometry of Meaning by Arthur M. Young — and
now was seeing dramatized in our collective action.

Primordial torus interpreted by
mathematician Charles Muses as
a chronotopological structure.

If you sever the connections that make up such a community and relocate the people individually out of their
entire fabric of meaning and put them in isolated units...
Tony: It's a refugee camp…
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Martha Senger doodle contrasting the integral dynamics of the vortex sphere with the fixed Cartesian Grid.
21

Goodman Building
poster by Barbara
Morgan

Martha: It’s a concentration camp. A one-dimensional,
mechanical grid. So now the notion of re-uniting living
and working together with all the other rich levels of
the potential of existence is a great challenge. An ecologically urgent challenge. And this is what I see
Goodman2 as being — an opportunity for a different
kind of shelter — one that integrates people in a naturally social, spontaneous way through integrating living and
working. Immediately, if you allow expression of the multidimensional aspects of a human being to thrive, you're
going to have an incredible kind of richness of experiments because it is the nature of human beings to
inquire into what’s possible, led by their own aesthetic
need to explore. So what’s needed is a kind of alternative structure that will allow natural processes to occur.
And shared meaning to unfold.
In fact I did a doodle that contrasts these two structures
— one based on the Cartesian grid and the other on the
vortex sphere. The first as you see justifies the present
top-down, patriarchal order with its repressive materialism — and the other the self-ordering from below that
artists know that feeds on the random — which chaos
theory has shown isn't really random at all.
Instead it’s a rich potential wholeness we can unfold if
we enlarge the context of what we’re doing or looking at.
As Katya Walter explains in The Tao of Chaos there’s a
third living term within the differences that seeks completion in a fourth term — a new sense of wholeness that
raises things — be it a conversation, dream, or conflict
of any kind — to a new level. This cohering movement is
centered in a hidden fifth dimension where its unity lies.
Bucky Fuller called it the vector equilibrium — where
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these pulsing thought rhythms are synchronized and
then unfold through the dodecahedron — a ‘rubber-donut
jitterbug’ that looks and acts suspiciously like a torus!
Tony: Now you're talking about creating a whole new
building — a really complex development — on Potrero
Hill, on a site, an old railroad tunnel, a little piece of
open space, a parcel of land many on The Hill want kept
undeveloped, for the price of $500,000.
Martha: About the open space issue, nobody argues
against the importance of preserving open physical
space. But we also need other kinds of open space —
spaces to experiment and reconnect the functions and
relationships that have also been destroyed by commodity culture. So to isolate and to reify one aspect of the
whole we need to restore is very anti-ecological.

Goodman2 architectural drawingby David Baker Associates

About the development cost, the new building will cost
several times that amount but because of other subsidies we’ve added — including one from the Redevelopment Agency for the Group’s relocation — it can provide
spaces that mix living and working at affordable prices.
This is in contrast to typical housing developments
which often cost a lot more but provide only a single
domestic use. It’s supposedly the American Dream —
the single family dwelling and all that goes with it. But
there are reasons why that’s becoming a thing of the
past — it atomizes and disempowers people. With the
break-up of traditional families and the general atomization of society, there's a need now for people to rebuild
communities. And thus to rethink housing. Really beginning with the residential hotel — which the Goodman
Building was — we see a compact kind of structure that

23

responds to a whole spectrum of needs and uses. It
allowed individuals to have a community and to share
things. As Soleri said, compactification is where it’s at if
there’s to be a future.
A fascinating aside — that's actually very much to this
point — Michio Kaku wrote in Hyperspace that beauty
and compactification are closely related in higher dimensional space — and that we're in the process of being
drawn into it in what he calls a dialectical shift from
quantity to quality. Though we can’t see it because it’s
curled up inside what we see as space and time.
Tony: I also read this book by Michio Kaku recently,
the one you just mentioned, and the interesting thing is
he says that, in advanced physics, there is a more and
more accepted concept of dimensions beyond the four
dimensions we ordinarily think of. And these other
dimensions are an essential part of creating our physical
reality. And maybe even beyond our physical reality.
How do you see his study and research here in relationship to this discussion, to the issues of an artist’s life as
you experienced it at the original Goodman Building?
Martha: Physicists are finding they can finally
unite relativity and quantum mechanics in higher
dimensional space — a ‘theory of everything’ that
wasn’'t possible in 4d spacetime.
Since I've always seen math and physics metaphorically
— as describing how I imagine things and the way they
come about — I see this as an elegant justification for
the higher dimensional space that’s needed for the
imagination to move in — three dimensions of space
plus one of clock time being entirely too small for my
24

mind to circle around in — to unfold the meaning of what
I see. Whereas a rotational symmetry — the pentagonal
symmetry of five-dimensional phase space — feels just
right!
Roger Penrose — the Oxford mathematician and a true
genius — has developed a quantum gravitational theory
of everything he calls a ‘twistor structure.’ Like Arthur
Young’s torus and Bucky Fuller’s ‘rubber donut’ except
wih an arrow visibly through it, it looks to me like a
hieroglyph of evolution. And spookily like a monoprint I
did years ago I called ‘cross section of how’!

Mathematician Roger Penrose’s
Twistor Geometry

Martha Senger monoprint:
‘cross section of how’

In his theory there’s a third world of ideal form that
underlies the worlds of matter and mind. An objectively
real world of truth, beauty and goodness — like Plato’s
though evolving rather than static — as we unfold its
patterns of wholeness into the world we actually cause
the quantum wave function of the universe to collapse
into physical reality — increasing knowledge as we
reduce mass and entropy — just as a sculptor chips
away whatever’s obscuring the ideal form she sees.
Tony: Or like the process of a poet. When you write one
poem, the next poem, perhaps, is a reaction to the first.
Martha: Right. You deepen — and compress. You edit
out what’s not needed.
Tony: You are only alive if you deepen. If you just
repeat yourself on a one dimensional level, there is a
kind of a death. We all go through that at certain points
of course.

25

The Goodman Building’s
great fourth floor studio
and skylight.
photo: Ted Milikin

Interior shot of the
Goodman Building.
photo: Ted Milikin

Martha: But to envision poets continuing to be poets,
painters continuing to paint, filmmakers continuing
to make films, at the same time they might come to
recognize that they can create, in addition to their
art works, the physical conditions for a different
form of life — by the same abstracting process.
This is the process I call ‘aesthetic bootstrapping’
though its really just art becoming conscious of itself
as the underlying reality and abstracting out whatever
obstructs the flow of beauty and freedom. We had a
glorious hint of it at the Goodman Building and it’s kept
me working to understand — and create situations
that can nurture it — ever since.
Tony: A lot of what we are talking about, too, is ‘reconstruction’.
Bringing in something new. The whole outlook of the past few
years has been basically ‘deconstruction.’ And ‘entropy.’ That
things are diminishing and diminishing. That nothing new
gets built. Now you’re talking about a process that actually is building something mysteriously.
Martha: Like I’ve said, it basically involves making
aesthetic judgements as you’re affected by something
then imagining how to reconstruct it to bring it into synch
with that new perspective. Beauty being the guide here.
As Derrida said in a rare reconstructive moment
— I’ll read you the quote — “The whole system that
has its sights on beauty supplies the course, determines vagueness as lack and gives sense and direction.” A re-formative process he called ‘economimesis’ it mimes the actions of physics — which he saw
as divine — in its unfolding of beauty. Which is a
pretty elegant summary of aesthetic reconstruction —
of the mysterious building you detected.
26

Tony: How will Goodman2's design reflect this and what
many of us learned at the original Goodman Building?
Martha: The Goodman Building was compact in the
sense that Kaku describes. I think that's what gave it the
feeling so many got from it that it was more than physical space. So many things happened there at so many
levels. Like the gold that was rumored to be hidden in
the newel posts that we'd search for late at night. And
the skeleton in the elevator shaft! The curved staircases
all the way up to the fourth floor. The long dark halls —
like veins — that connected it all. The stained glass window at the end of the long hall on the second floor. And
the drawing of Gandhi that hung beneath it. And the bulletin boards outside the kitchen where announcements
were made and messages sent back and forth.

Interior shots of
the Goodman
Building
photos: Ted Milikin

Not to mention the graffiti on the wall of the third
floor bathoom! Each space was so unique. Like
Billy’s with its secret compartments. And Tom’s
with its great swing and narrow lofts — like catwalks. The back deck with everyone’s plants. And
the theater rehearsals held there — Michele and
the Witches of Lillith — and Kenny’s productions
of Brecht. Or Paula hosing down a canvas! And
the guillotine we'd built to celebrate Bastille Day
that was never taken down. Then all the other
action that flowed through the building after we
opened the storefronts. Talk about living theater!
All compressed in this higher dimension — in a
way that let each thing be its own yet part of a
whole. Always open and unfinished. And flexible...
Tony: Is this evolution?
27

Architectural drawing of
Goodman2 atrium by
David Baker Associates

Martha: Truly. Which actually started with the building’s
many different uses over the years. Though it was originally built in 1860 as the two-story townhouse of a
wealthy hat merchant, it got massively remodeled after
the earthquake and fire — with five storefronts added at
the street level. And a huge skylighted studio — really
as you know right out of La Boheme — on the top floor.
Later it morphed from rooms and apartments to commercial offices. Then finally after World War II — when it
had become run down — to artists’ live/work studios.
Janis Joplin lived there in the sixties. And the conceptual
artist Terry Fox. Also Wes Wilson who made those classic psychedelic posters. Then the wider connections that
came with developing the storefronts. Plus later when
we began our battle to save the building there was a
constant flow of supporters. And the press. And other
groups we’d connected with. So this is how it became so
complex — so much more than merely physical space.
The new building — Goodman2 — is based on this
idea of a complex system. Of the whole being greater
than the sum of its parts. Each individual studio will
have a small kitchen — unlike the Goodman Building
where we all used the same one. And there will be a
central meeting room where residents can talk and
plan together like we did at the original Goodman
Building. I think of this as the building's vortex or selforganizing center. Plus we plan to have a theater and
other community use spaces. In fact that was why we
didn’t settle for an existing building but spent all these
years to build our own. So it could have a theater.
And shared production space. A media center we're
thinking that could connect the theater and the live/work
studios with the community outside the building. The
goal, again, was — is — to create wholeness.
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I call Goodman2 chaos architecture — a poststructuralist
structure that has a center but one that’s not static but
dynamic and evolving. It could also be thought of as a
reconstructive habitat because it’s intended to conserve
meaning as well as materials and energy. So Goodman2’s
intended to be, as the original Goodman Building
was, a ‘thick ecology’ like Arcosanti, that coheres what’s
been fragmented.
Heidegger said modern thought since Plato has served
to ‘enframe’ reality and shut out Being. And that the task
of artists was to “liberate the open and establish it in its
structure.”

Drawing of torus from The
Geometry of Meaning by Arthur
M. Young.

That’s an even broader view of Goodman2’s design.
We've based it, like I’ve said, on the reflexive geometry
of the torus — the process structure I learned about
from Arthur Young and saw manifested at the original
Goodman Building. So Goodman2 will be the first building,
to my knowledge, that’s ever been designed around the
torus — and the first that’s been intentionally designed to
make room — open space for — a higher dimensional life.
Tony: Today in the alternative culture there seems to
be a powerful interest in reclaiming and liberating the
individual and group psychic forces. The psyche
contains vital information. And the psyche is also a
collective phenomena. But perhaps not only collective — or, maybe collective in many different ways.

Fisheye photo of Goodman
Building by Ted Milikin

Martha: Yes, a quantum collective. Some physicists, as
we’ve seen, compare the wave function that describes
the quantum field to the score of a dance — a rhythmical unfolding of wholeness and beauty that’s reflected in
the flow of the co