The Architectural Whole (Part-to-Whole Relations)

Definition

The architectural whole names architecture's founding norm — that building, city, and their parts should resolve into an integrated unity through part-to-whole relations — and, by the twenty-first century, the norm's exhaustion. Erdman's chapter states both halves. The norm: "From Vitruvius's 'Ten Books on Architecture'… to Le Corbusier's Vers Une Architecture (1923), the architectural whole is reasserted as a primary goal for the beauty, function, and pleasure of architectural design" (note 2). The exhaustion: "Interiors are episodic in nature and often designed in vignette-like formats that are understood as autonomous 'rooms.' Because interiors are disjointed from the exterior, the autonomous design of interiors contradicts five hundred years of architectural theory about part-to-whole relationships – the holy grail of rules driving architecture." The whole-function that drove architects to "see the interior as the inside (merely the other side of a building enclosure) instead of seeing its potential interiority" — and the question the chapter leaves standing: "Is wholeness really the penultimate goal of architecture?"

The concept has a dated counter-tradition: "Arguably, it was not until CIAM 9 (1953) when the Smithsons critiqued Le Corbusier's Athens Charter (1933) and subsequently formed Team 10, that ideas about fragmentary and disjointed cities and architectures emerged," reaching readers through Ockman's Architecture Culture 1943–68 and Hays's Architecture Theory Since 1968 (note 2). Its 1980s radicalization is the disjunctive architecture of Deconstruction, Rossi, and Tschumi — "explosive fields of objects that were syntactically related but conceived as separate autonomous follies" (note 9) — which digital architecture then abandoned ("an obsession with continuity and an intellectually stubborn insistence on designing the whole").

The Replacement Program: New Types of Wholes

Erdman's contribution is not the demolition of the whole but its revision: "the future of the city is one where the topologies of interior and exterior will no longer need to be smoothed out, and where architects will no longer concern themselves with resolving part-to-whole relationships. Instead, design will play a greater role in giving cohesion to experiences that are currently disparate – making new types of wholes – while allowing for the semi-autonomy of interiors and exteriors to coexist." The whole returns as cohesion without integration: the Repulse Bay ensemble "never fully integrate[s] or make[s] the site whole, yet incrementally they produce enough pressure and tension to tether remote and unconnected experiences to one another." The test-case question: "Can strategies of alteration be pushed close to the disjunctive extreme of fragmentation while maintaining enough cohesion to be understood as forming new types of architectural wholes?"

Key Thinkers

David Erdman — the concept's revisionist: the whole diagnosed as an obsession ("Is wholeness really the penultimate goal of architecture?") and re-founded as cohesion-without-integration via alteration (2018).
Le Corbusier — the whole's modern reassertion (Vers une architecture, 1923), critiqued by the Smithsons at CIAM 9.
Alison & Peter Smithson / Team 10 — the counter-tradition's founders: "ideas about fragmentary and disjointed cities and architectures" (1953) (not paged — see log).
Bernard Tschumi — the disjunctive radicalization: Architecture and Disjunction as "perhaps most importantly" the antecedent of the fragment-agility Erdman revives.
Aldo Rossi — the predecessor (Architecture and the City, 1982) in the disjunctive lineage.
Joan Ockman & K. Michael Hays — the anthology editors through whom the counter-whole theories reached readers (Architecture Culture 1943–68; Architecture Theory Since 1968) (not paged — see log).

Alteration — the concept's replacement program: fine-grained, episodic interventions that tether experiences into "new types of wholes."
Objecthood — the whole's measure redefined: "when discussing the architectural whole, we are effectively talking about degrees of 'objecthood.'"
Interiority — the concept the whole-tradition suppressed: architects saw "the inside… instead of seeing its potential interiority."
Deconstruction — the disjunctive architecture the whole-tradition counted as its negation, revived postdigitally.
Adaptive Reuse — the practice where the whole-question is decided: adaptation "strives ardently for the production of a singular, autonomous whole"; alteration does not.
Interior Urbanism — the city-scale face: the twenty-first-century city as "built out, episodic, layered, and interiorized," its interior and exterior "entirely different from and at odds with one another."
Inside/Outside Dialectic — the division whose "topologies… will no longer need to be smoothed out."
Quasi-Autonomous Interior — the coexistence condition the new whole must preserve: "the semi-autonomy of interiors and exteriors to coexist."
Modernism — the tradition that carried the whole from Vitruvius to the Athens Charter.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

Altered (e)states: Architecture and its interiority (Erdman 2018) — the concept's source: the five-hundred-year part-to-whole diagnosis, the Vitruvius-to-Le Corbusier genealogy and CIAM 9 counter-tradition (note 2), the disjunctive 1980s and its postdigital revival (note 9), and the cohesion-without-integration program (Repulse Bay).

Open Questions

"Is wholeness really the penultimate goal of architecture?" — presumably a slip for "ultimate," but read literally it implies a goal after wholeness. Is the new type of whole (cohesion without integration) that further goal, or is something else intended?
If part-to-whole resolution is abandoned, what happens to beauty, function, and pleasure — the ends the whole allegedly served since Vitruvius? Does cohesion-without-integration serve them, or replace them with experiential tethering?
Is the whole's finance-driven dissolution (environments "intentionally and architecturally unresolved" by multi-designer risk-spreading) the same phenomenon as the theoretical dissolution Erdman theorizes — or is theory simply accommodating a developer economy it did not choose?
Can "new types of wholes" be recognized as wholes at all without the integration-criterion the tradition supplied — what distinguishes a tethered ensemble from a mere aggregate (cf. assemblage)?