Erdman, David
Erdman, David
Bio Sketch
David Erdman is an American architect, educator, and practitioner-theorist of the interiorized city. He was Chair of the Department of Graduate Architecture and Urban Design at Pratt Institute's School of Architecture (2016–2023), overseeing its MArch, MS Architecture, and MS Urban Design programs, and previously Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong's Department of Architecture (2010–2016), where he resided and taught while developing the alteration thesis (web-verified via pratt.edu, soa.syr.edu, arch.hku.hk). He is co-founding partner of davidclovers (founded 2007 with Clover Lee; relocated from Los Angeles to Hong Kong in 2009; now plusClover), a practice "recognized for its ability to produce unique, custom manufactured residential projects and commercial interiors" whose projects "emphasize architectural massing and its material effects" (HK Design Centre directory); he also co-founded the practice servo, has designed and completed over twenty built projects, and is a Rome Prize recipient (American Academy in Rome). His chapter in Marinic's Interior Architecture Reader — which reports that the concept of alteration "stems directly from these observations in my own experience and practice with davidclovers while I resided and taught in Hong Kong" — is the built-practice companion to the Reader's theoretical chapters, and the source of the wiki's alteration, objecthood, architectural-whole, and interiorized-object concepts.
Key Works
- *Altered (e)states: Architecture and its interiority* (2018) — Chapter 49 of The Interior Architecture Reader (ed. Marinic): interiority as perception-state, alteration against adaptation, the postdigital revival of disjunction, and the Repulse Bay Complex as built demonstration.
- "Altered (e)states" (shorter version), Architectural Design ("Mass Customized Cities" issue) — with Clover Lee; the chapter acknowledges that portions appear there and in the DADA 2014 exhibition catalogue (not yet ingested).
Key Concepts
Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:
- interiority — the state of mind and perception induced by an inwardly focused architectural environment, with "degrees of interiority" not limited to physical insideness
- alteration — the centripetal, fine-grained reconfiguration of an object's interior, against adaptation's ground-up whole-system approach
- objecthood — Fried-derived, perceptual and graded ("degrees of objecthood"), explicitly distinguished from Speculative Realism/OOO
- interiorized-object — the object that pulls experience inward (involutions, concave facades, figured interiors); objects inserted within objects; the collective object
- architectural-whole — the part-to-whole tradition the chapter undoes; "new types of wholes" made from disjointed interventions
- adaptive-reuse — adaptation's "marketing ploy" critique; the alterations-and-additions (A+A) work of dense-city practice
- interior-urbanism — the twenty-first-century city as "built out, episodic, layered, and interiorized" (Hong Kong)
- heterogeneous-space — "amplifying the heterogeneity of the tower units" at Repulse Bay
- quasi-autonomous-interior — the "semi-autonomy of interiors and exteriors to coexist"
Relevance to the Core Research
Erdman matters to the wiki's interior-architecture cluster in three ways. First, he supplies the concept of alteration — the missing practice-term between adaptation (whole-system, ground-up, biological) and adaptive reuse (untheorized, "marketing ploy") — and with it a fourth use of the discipline's "alteration" vocabulary after Hollis's practice-of-alteration and Brooker & Stone's remodeling: alteration as interiorized, centripetal, object-scale intervention. Second, his definition of interiority as a perception-state with degrees — "not limited to whether it is physically within or outside of a building" — gives the wiki's twenty-register interiority cluster its most explicitly design-operative formulation: interiority as an instrument "to alter the state of various environments." Third, he is the Reader's practitioner of the interiorized twenty-first-century city: with Solomon (ch. 48) he forms the anthology's Hong Kong pair, but where Solomon reads the interiorized city politically (atmosphere, occupation), Erdman reads it operationally (what a practice should do in it) — alteration as the discipline's answer to the built-out, finance-fragmented, GFA-limited metropolis, and the counter-register to the Reader's computational chapters' "insistence on designing the whole."
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:
