Simultaneous City

"The description of something happening, often of significance, can be understood by the word ‘event.’ I am not interested in the notion of a large gathering with cocktails and food on toothpicks; instead the kind of event that shapes the city. Since the beginning of man’s conscious creation of the built environment, there has been a combative relationship between the human and physical world. “There is no architecture without action, no architecture without events, no architecture without program. By extension, there is no architecture without violence.” Bernard Tschumi discusses notions of event in his essay “Violence of Architecture.” He describes two distinct orders, the order of architecture, defined by rigorous geometry and ideal spaces, and the order of the human, which is loosely defined by a field. By taking a hierarchical position on an order, it can be forcibly intruded on another. The reaction, human bumping into walls or corridors too narrow for large crowds, becomes the event of violence. Simultaneous Cities exists independently of each other but inhabit the same physical world. At the moments when two or more of these conceptually independent cities collide, a point, building, block, or park become the resulting site of event."