2. By extension, there is no architecture without violence.
By violence I do not mean the brutality that destroys physical or emotional integrity but a metaphor for the intensity of relationship between individuals and their surrounding spaces.
First, there is the violence that all individuals inflict on spaces by their very presence, by their intrusion into the controlled order of architecture. (...) Bodies carve all sorts of new and unexpected spaces, through fluid or erratic motions. Architecture, then, is only an organism engaged in constant intercourse with users, whose bodies rush against the carefully established rules of architectural thought.
But if bodies violate the purity of architectural spaces, one might rightly wonder about the reverse: the violence inflicted by narrow corridors on large crowds, the symbolic or physical violence of buildings on users. (...) The place your body inhabits is inscribed in your imagination, your unconscious, as a place of possible bliss. Or menace. What if you are forced to abandon your imaginary spatial markings? A torturer wants you, the victim, to regress, because he wants to demean his prey, to make you lose your identity as a subject. Suddenly you have no choice; running away is impossible. The rooms are too small or too big, the ceiling too low or too high. Violence exercised by and through space is spatial torture.
- Bernard Tschumi, excerpts from "Architecture And Disjunction"
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that's one way to think about violence. or architecture for that matter.
also, how interesting it would be if space around us was a solid mass, and the bodies of individuals would effortlessly carve paths with their movements. how would streets look then? how would supermarkets, clubs, parks, bedrooms look? there's something very intimate and animal-like about such a thought.