Relativistic City I
Urban Curvature and the Accumulation of Time-Experience
Type
Urban Framework, M.Arch Thesis
Location
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Year
2026
Collaborators
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This master’s thesis project began with a single question: Is the city we inhabit truly flat?
Although the city appears flat on a map, not every place is experienced in the same way. Places where people repeatedly move, pause, observe, and remember accumulate greater layers of time and experience. I understood this accumulation as an invisible weight placed upon the seemingly flat field of the city. Just as a surface bends under weight, places with greater accumulation develop a deeper curvature and form stronger relationships with their surroundings. I defined this spatial condition as “urban curvature.”
A greater degree of urban curvature therefore indicates a place where movement, duration, vision, and memory are concentrated, producing stronger spatial relationships. In contrast, places with lower curvature can be understood as spaces with less accumulated experience and weaker connections to their surroundings. Urban curvature can serve as one measure for evaluating the quality of space, while also suggesting how underused places might be improved through new circulation, programs, and opportunities for people to stay and engage.
To communicate this invisible accumulation of time and experience, I created a drawing machine. Rather than measuring or accurately reproducing the city, the machine serves as a visual representation of the abstract concept of urban curvature through repeated movements and overlapping lines. The concentration and dispersion of these lines express differences in accumulated movement and experience, as well as the varying spatial intensities they produce.
Urban Curvature
Cities are often understood as flat systems organized by movement and efficiency. However, the actual experience of the city is shaped by more than circulation. People repeatedly return to certain places, spend time there, and build layers of memory and experience. This project interprets that accumulation through the concept of urban curvature. Just as mass bends space in physics, the accumulation of time and experience can alter the character of urban space. Places with deeper layers of experience gain a stronger presence within the city, attracting movement, attention, and memory.
Positioning the Relativistic City among urban theories, this diagram proposes time not as a passive background, but as an active force that accumulates experience and reshapes the urban field.
This project proposes urban curvature as a conceptual framework for reading how certain places gain presence over time. Like gravity in relativity, places that attract attention, movement, and duration accumulate experience, gradually strengthening their influence within the urban field.
Urban mass is understood through the density of accumulated time and experience rather than physical scale. Program relationships then amplify or diminish curvature, reshaping attraction and movement within the urban field.
This drawing speculatively visualizes the city through the framework of the Relativistic City. Rather than a flat field organized only by function, the city is imagined as a curved urban surface shaped by the uneven accumulation of time and experience.
Drawing Machine
The drawing machine was developed as a visual experiment to observe the accumulation of time. As the machine moves, lines are repeatedly drawn and layered, allowing the image to gradually change through the accumulation of trajectories.The machine does not generate the architectural form. Instead, it shows how repetition, duration, and overlap can transform an image over time. It serves as a way to make the invisible process of temporal accumulation visible.
The drawing machine was designed to generate continuous movement, drawing from the principle of Galileo Galilei’s early pendulum clock escapement. Multiple axes translate rotational motion into the movement of an arm, while a pen attached to its end records the trajectory as lines. The elastic arm produces varying lines according to changes in speed and direction, revealing how movement gradually accumulates into an image over time.
This drawing overlays the trajectories generated by the drawing machine onto areas of intense experiential accumulation around Hancock Park and LACMA. The movement of the arm was calibrated through site analysis, including frequency of use, potential for lingering, and flows of movement and attention, visualizing how the density of time and experience forms differently across places.
Site — After Intervention (Pit Plaza), 9 × 6 in
Levitated Mass, 5 × 7 in