The Difficult Whole

Definition

Venturi's compositional goal in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966, ch. "The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole"): the unity achieved by an architecture of complexity and contradiction "because the whole is difficult to achieve." Its formula is the book's capstone: "It must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion. More is not less" (p. 20). The theory is Gestalt ("a perceptual whole the result of, and yet more than, the sum of its parts") plus Herbert A. Simon's complex system ("a large number of parts that interact in a non-simple way"). The difficult whole "includes multiplicity and diversity of elements in relationships that are inconsistent or among the weaker kinds perceptually": it embraces the "difficult" numbers of parts (the duality modern composition suppresses — Sullivan's Farmers' and Merchants' Union Bank; the twin churches of the Piazza del Popolo), diverse and contrapuntal directions, and equal combinations of uninflected parts (the Porta Pia; Sullivan's Grinnell bank; Aalto's Wolfsburg), where "the whole does not depend on inflection, or the easier relationships of the dominant binder, or motival consistency" but on "superimposition and symmetry rather than through dominance and hierarchy."

Its devices, in ascending difficulty: the dominant binder (the third element, axis, circulation, or major order — "a doubtful panacea, like the fallen snow which unifies a chaotic landscape"); inflection (the fragment implying the whole); and equal combinations. The whole may be deliberately incomplete: "the paradox of the whole fragment: the building which is a whole at one level and a fragment of a greater whole at another level" — validated through Maki's "group form" against the "perfect single building," and through the Gothic cathedral unfinished in program yet complete in effect. The chapter's urban terminus rehabilitates the commercial strip against Blake's God's Own Junkyard: "Main Street is almost all right" — its unity "not the obvious or easy unity derived from the dominant binder or the motival order… but that derived from a complex and illusive order of the difficult whole," which "maintains, but only just maintains, a control over the clashing elements which compose it."

Key Thinkers

• venturi-robert — the concept's author (1966); the difficult whole as the obligational counterpart of complexity: inclusion without forfeiture of unity.
• Herbert A. Simon — the complex-systems definition quoted as the whole's formal criterion (PAGE NEEDED — see log).
• Gestalt psychology — the perceptual theory (whole-plus-sum; varying degrees of wholeness) on which the argument runs.

Related Concepts

• whole-greater-than-parts — Goldberger's urban-composition principle; the difficult whole's civic descendant.
• both-and — the contradiction phenomenon the difficult whole must include.
• inflection — its principal device of unity-without-suppression.
• architectural-whole — the general concept of wholeness in architectural composition.
• organized-complexity — Jacobs's epistemology of the many-variable system; the city-scale cousin of Simon's definition.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• *Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture* (Venturi 1966) — the concept's chapter (pp. 88–97): the difficult numbers (duality embraced); inflection and the dominant binder; equal combinations (Porta Pia, Sullivan, Aalto, Michelucci); the unresolved whole admitted ("Poets and playwrights acknowledge dilemmas without solutions"); the whole fragment; Main Street.
• Inside Looking In (McClure & McClure 2018) — "difficult unity of inclusion, rather than the easy unity of exclusion" quoted as an evaluative criterion; the included whole against the hermetic-seal.

Open Questions

• The difficult whole is specified negatively (what it includes) more than positively (when it coheres). Is there a criterion for the failed difficult whole — the whole that is merely chaotic — beyond Heckscher's "maintains, but only just maintains"?
• Does the framework scale from the building and the piazza to the region, or does the "obligation toward the whole" silently presuppose a single perceiving subject at townscape distance?