The Whole Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts

Definition

The urban-design principle Goldberger calls "the single most important principle of urban architecture": a city works when its buildings are composed as sections of a larger whole, so that the whole exceeds the sum of its parts. "That doesn't mean that the parts need be the same or that they need to be as subjugated to the whole as in the work of the Woods and Nash. But it does mean that for a city to work, architects need to feel as if they are designing a section of a much larger composition, a composition that began long before them and will continue long after them." The principle is illustrated by the tessellated townscape forms — Nash's Regent's Park terraces, the two John Woods' Circus and Royal Crescent at Bath — where individual houses "are like members of a chorus line… supposed to look identical, and their moves are all calculated in terms of their effect on the whole." But Goldberger is careful to distinguish coherence from uniformity: Bath and Paris (the eight-storey limestone apartment block reproduced across the city) work because their repeated types carry internal richness, texture, and sensuality, whereas "long, long rows of identical brick houses" — and Park Avenue's uniform blocks — are "oppressively dull." The principle therefore demands both consistency and variety, and it makes architectural design a civic rather than a purely private act.

Key Thinkers

• Paul Goldberger — states the principle and calibrates it against monotony.
• John Nash — Regent's Park: terrace houses as parts of a single composition. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• John Wood the Elder and John Wood the Younger — the Circus and the Royal Crescent, Bath. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• Trystan Edwards — the etiquette of buildings and the hierarchy of public, commercial, and domestic fronts. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)

Related Concepts

• street-as-room — the street as the room the composition makes.
• sense-of-place — place as the emergent product of composed parts.
• background-and-foreground-buildings — the ratio through which the whole is articulated without monotony.
• urbanism — the general discipline of city making.
• new-urbanism — the movement that restores compositional street making.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/goldberger-2009-why-architecture-matters — ch. 7 (pp. 161–65) states the principle and develops it through Bath, Paris, London, and Central Park West.

Open Questions

• If the whole must exceed its parts, whose composition is it — the planner's, the market's, or the accumulated decisions of many architects working without a plan?
• Can the principle be applied under contemporary land ownership, where no single hand composes the street?