harmoy (n.)
from the Greek ἁρμονία harmonia
meaning “unison, togetherness, a relation of sounds”
from the verb ἁρμόζω harmozō, “fit together, join”

Contemporary art should have prepared us to stop looking exclusively for harmony, but also to perceive contrasts, tensions and discontinuities, fragmentations and accumulations in a positive way, and thus to look at the city within a dynamic system that is not defined by previous aesthetics. (...)

The hypercity is not a disorderly collection. It is created by a multitude of rational and logical decisions, which, however, obey different logics that are often in competition with each other. Due to the large number of interventions, the result for the overall space is hardly predictable.

Sync occurs through mutual cuing, in the same way that an orchestra can keep perfect time without a conductor.

Half a millenium later our cities have become monstruous; too uncontrolled to be painted, infinitely complicated, dysfuntional to the largest possible extent. [...] yet we grapple ourselves to Brauns hopeful frontispiece: "Community, Security, Harmony...".

Hundreds of thousands of people with hundreds of thousands of plans and purposes built the city and only they will rebuild the city.

The self-destruction of the urban environment is already well under way. The explosion of cities into the countryside, covering it with what Mumford calls “a formless mass of thinly spread semi-urban tissue,” is directly governed by the imperatives of consumption. The dictatorship of the automobile — the pilot product of the first stage of commodity abundance — has left its mark on the landscape with the dominance of freeways, which tear up the old urban centers and promote an ever-wider dispersal. Within this process various forms of partially reconstituted urban fabric fleetingly crystallize around “distribution factories” — giant shopping centers built in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by acre of parking lots. These temples of frenetic consumption are subject to the same irresistible centrifugal momentum, which casts them aside as soon as they haven engendered enough surrounding development to become overburdened secondary centers in their turn. But the technical organization of consumption is only the most visible aspect of the general process of decomposition that has brought the city to the point of consuming itself.

I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning. [...]

I prefer "both-and" to "either-or," black and white, and sometimes gray, to black or white.

A valid architecture evokes many levels of meaning and combinations of focus: its space and its elements become readable and workable in several ways at once. But an architecture of complexity and contradiction has a special obligation toward the whole: its truth must be in its totality or its implications of totality.

It must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion.

"Both-And"

In space, an open system resembles a chemical colloid rather than a compound. The most familiar and most magnificent open system familiar to all of us is Charles Darwin’s version of evolution, which combines elements of chance mutation, path dependence, and the environment conceived as a colloid within which natural selection does its work.

synchrony (n.)

from the Greek σύνχρόνος súnkhrónos
σύν (sún, “with”) + χρόνος (khrónos, “time”)

the way in which two or more things happen, develop, move, etc. at the same time or speed

However, permanences in the city are not only "pathological." At times they may be "propelling." They serve to bring the past into the present, providing a past that can stilI be experienced. Artifacts like the Theater at Arles or the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua tend to synchronize with the process of urbanization because they are not defined only by an originaI or previous function, nor by their context, but have survived precisely because of their form-one which is able to accommodate different functions over time.

There are moments, and it is only a matter of a few seconds, when you feel the presence of the eternal harmony....A terrible thing is the frightful clearness with which it manifests itself and the rapture with which it fills you....During these five seconds I live a whole human existence, and for that I would give my whole life and not think that I was paying too dearly.