Altered (e)states: Architecture and its interiority

Author: David Erdman Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 49 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge) Raw file: raw/chapters/erdman-2018-altered-estates.md

Summary

Erdman's chapter proposes interiority as a design instrument and alteration as its practice: if interiors are "merely a category of professional work that occur on the inside of buildings," interiority is "the state of mind and perception induced by an architectural environment that is inwardly focused" — a condition with "varying 'degrees of interiority'" not limited to physical insideness, which "allows architects to consider how to alter the state of various environments." Working from his Hong Kong practice davidclovers, Erdman argues that the twenty-first-century city — dense, built-out, "episodic, layered, and interiorized" (Hong Kong as its emblem) — demands alteration rather than adaptation: not the ground-up, whole-system "continuous, smooth, singular, and fully integrated approach" contemporary software favors, but a "centripetal," fine-grained reconfiguration of objects' interiors that revives the disjunctive theories of the 1980s (Deconstruction, Rossi, Tschumi) from a postdigital position. The chapter's provocation is directed at five hundred years of part-to-whole theory: architects should stop trying to resolve the whole and instead "make new types of wholes" from fragmentary interventions that keep "the semi-autonomy of interiors and exteriors" coexisting. The Repulse Bay Complex renovation (2011–2013) is the built demonstration: a series of disconnected interventions that "never fully integrate or make the site whole, yet incrementally they produce enough pressure and tension to tether remote and unconnected experiences to one another." The title puns on states (interiority as "state of mind and perception"), estates (Hong Kong's housing estates and development estates — Repulse Bay, Bel-Air On The Peak), and — implicitly — the e-states of mediated selves (Instagram, Facebook), though the text never glosses the pun.

Key Claims

The definition of interiority as a state, not a place: "If interiors are merely a category of professional work that occur on the inside of buildings, 'interiority' is the state of mind and perception induced by an architectural environment that is inwardly focused. An environment of this nature may have varying 'degrees of interiority' but is not limited to whether it is physically within or outside of a building" (interiority) — interiority detached from the physical interior, distributed by degree.
Interiority as a disciplinary instrument: "Interiority, a concept of increasing importance in urban centers today, allows architects to consider how to alter the state of various environments. It opens up a productively disciplinary way to design interiors, while still considering them explicitly architectural" (interior-architecture) — a way to design interiors that keeps them architectural, against the disciplinary exile of interiors work.
Interiors as episodic and anti-part-to-whole: "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" (architectural-whole).
The historical dating of the whole: From Vitruvius's Ten Books 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"; the counter-tradition begins only at CIAM 9 (1953), when the Smithsons critiqued the Athens Charter and formed Team 10, and reaches readers only in Ockman's Architecture Culture and Hays's Architecture Theory Since 1968 (note 2) (architectural-whole, modernism).
The enclosure diagnosis: "architects have seen the interior as the inside (merely the other side of a building enclosure) instead of seeing its potential interiority" (enclosure, inside-outside-dialectic).
The practice-bias claim: "Young architects and architecture firms are often biased toward an overt preference for 'ground-up' work rather than interior-based work, suggesting an obsession with the 'architectural whole.' This, in turn, perpetuates difficulty for small independent offices in contemporary cities, where much of the work available is interior oriented" — against which Erdman poses the rhetorical question: "Yet this compulsion to address the whole exhausts resources and capital – and to what end? Is wholeness really the penultimate goal of architecture?"
The dying topological city: "One could argue that the 'topological city' with its highly continuous, centrifugal qualities (and the economies and politics that drive them) is a rare and dying breed" — and its replacement program: "cities will have to consider how to adapt and alter their existing structures to grow inward, to reconfigure their interior, and to design for the discontinuities and temporal layering of their urbanity" (topology, interior-urbanism).
Hong Kong as the twenty-first-century city: "In many ways, it is more emblematic of a city of the twenty-first century (built out, episodic, layered, and interiorized) than it is of a late-twentieth-century city that is open, smooth, continuous, and free to grow outward" — its population growth occurred 1931–1961, "roughly forty to fifty years earlier than cities like Shenzhen, Beijing, or Shanghai"; it is "the third densest region in the world" and "the most expensive city to build in" (note 6). Adaptive-reuse competitions and awards are cited as the trajectory already emerging (interior-urbanism, adaptive-reuse).
Finance-driven disunity: "Driven largely by the desire to minimize risk by involving more than one designer, style, and brand, contemporary practices in development/financing (with its associated project briefs) call for this opposition. These are trends perpetuating environments that are intentionally and architecturally unresolved" — tenders increasingly broken up among practices (Swire, Hong Kong Shanghai Hotels with Gehry, Kuma, Peter Marino; Pacific Century's Bel-Air On The Peak shifting from "faux neo baroque interiors" to "the sleek curvilinear modernity of Norman Fosters' 8 towers," note 7).
The psychoanalytic corollary: "the perception of a twenty-first-century city's interiority contrasts with the perception of its exteriority. This correlation could equally apply to the psyche of the contemporary urban subject, with their highly mediated and constructed exteriors (think Instagram, Facebook, etc.), that allow for a heightened contrast between their interior and exterior selves" — the city and its subjects both "no longer expect part-to-whole relations to necessarily resolve themselves"; the "thirst for urbanity" driving population into cities "could be precisely a desire for this discordant texture of experiences" (interiority, self-fashioning-adjacent).
The post-part-to-whole program: "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" (inside-outside-dialectic, quasi-autonomous-interior, architectural-whole).
The adaptation/alteration distinction (the chapter's core coinage): adaptation — the twentieth century's biological-model program ("the endlessness of Kiesler to the metabolic capacities of architecture, as seen in Japan": Kiesler's Endless House 1950, Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower 1972, note 8) and today's "adaptive reuse," "used more often as a marketing ploy than a conceptual opportunity" — is conceived "from the ground up, introducing a comprehensive and whole architectural system into a context," and "the contemporary field of architectural software favors this continuous, smooth, singular, and fully integrated approach." "Alteration," by contrast, "builds upon the ideas of adaptation by affronting standardization – with a few distinctions. It is an approach that is somewhat more restrained, fine grained, and interiorized. Alteration could be called a more 'centripetal,' rather than 'centrifugal,' approach to design, one that pulls and tucks architecture into shape, rather than deforms a structure to adjust it to adjacencies" (alteration, adaptive-reuse).
The postdigital revival of disjunction: the disjunctive theories of the 1980s (the MOMA 1988 Deconstruction show; Rossi's Architecture and the City; "perhaps most importantly" Tschumi's Architecture and Disjunction) are "absent from digital architecture today due to an obsession with continuity and an intellectually stubborn insistence on designing the whole." From a postdigital perspective they offer "a limit for testing": predigital-era projects were "explosive fields of objects that were syntactically related but conceived as separate autonomous follies"; looking back "after twenty years of smooth and continuous digital projects" (Yokohama Port Terminal as the type-case) means embracing "the agility of the fragment and the disjunctive" while exploring how interventions "do not remain entirely separate follies but instead form new types of more complex architectural wholes" (note 9) (deconstruction, digital-architecture, tschumi-bernard).
Objecthood defined (against OOO): the chapter's object theory draws on Michael Fried's "Art and Objecthood" (1967) — "a predominately perceptual and sensual idea within the practices and aesthetics of art – something more directly aligned to architecture and its potential praxes when compared with Graham Harmon's Triple O, Meillasoux, and philosophical discussions of Kant's object of knowledge… Fried's discussion of objecthood is explicitly more experiential and architectural" (note 10). "When discussing the architectural whole, we are effectively talking about degrees of 'objecthood.' Traditionally, architects consider objects as fully integrated entities; interior and exterior, structure and skin, and so on" (objecthood, architectural-object).
Alteration as interior reconfiguration: "Where adaptation is about objects adjusting to their surroundings, alteration is about reconfiguring the object's interior. To what extent that reconfiguration can detach itself from the original object and form new objects, or refashion the original into a new collective object, is where alteration holds its promise. Alteration has both the potential to maintain a degree of objecthood, and yet, in itself, is fragmentary and episodic. Altering is an exercise in adjusting select, disjointed areas – not the entire original object" (alteration, objecthood).
Objects within objects; the collective object: "objects are inserted within objects at some scales, while at other scales a multiplicity of objects (interior and exterior) are instrumentalized to collectively imbue a large-scale degree of objecthood… Each technique, I realized, invokes degrees of a perceptual interiority, which is not always manifested through an intervention on the inside" (interiorized-object, interiority).
The interiorized object and centripetal qualities: in Hong Kong's pressurized, GFA-limited context, "The quality of objects in that context shifted; seeking out ways to pull experience into them rather than showing off their qualities exuberantly up front – or on the exterior. The use of minor and major forms of involutions ranging from subtle, concave facades to deep, thick, figured interiors, was a method of spinning context inward." What distinguishes the work "are these interiorized objects and their centripetal qualities, a quality that breeds a semi-autonomy reinforcing the episodic and interventionist characteristics between them" (interiorized-object, alteration).
The mixed-bag scope of contemporary practice: "Increasingly architecture practice takes on projects that are a mixed bag of scope involving one part architecture, one part interior, one part conservation, one part landscape, and one part product design (or some variation thereof)" — the circumstantial necessity that makes interiority and alteration central; exemplified by Tod Williams/Billie Tsien's Asia Society Hong Kong Center and Herzog & de Meuron's Police Central Headquarters, "comfortable spanning the gamut between ground-up construction, conservation, landscape, and interiors," with the Build-Operate-and-Transfer typology emerging in Asia (note 5).
The Repulse Bay Complex as built demonstration: one of Hong Kong's first comprehensive "gut" renovations of a tower, coupled with a podium-and-complex revamp (2011–2013); the original an "Arquitectonica 'knock-off,' infamous for the gaping hole between the third and fourth tower," each tower "standardized and homogeneous." The brief "aimed at amplifying the heterogeneity of the tower units while simultaneously imbuing the property at large with a greater sense of cohesion"; the project "illustrates the potential of the disjunctive to produce a new type of spatial fabric that is cohesive yet agile and formed out of a series of disconnected interventions," and "is different from an adaptation, which strives ardently for the production of a singular, autonomous whole" (heterogeneous-space, homogeneous-space, alteration).
Cohesion without integration: each intervention "has its own discrete limits and could not be conceived a continuous whole"; a "composite of technological approaches are deployed, ranging from digitally prefabricated construction to algorithmically generated graphic design and coloring techniques," proliferating "a high degree of specificity, dexterity, and heterogeneity, while avoiding episodic fragmentation"; "The ensemble of interventions never fully integrates or makes the site whole, yet incrementally they produce enough pressure and tension to tether remote and unconnected experiences to one another."
Alteration as resourcefulness: "Alteration may also unleash other types of resources, from the conceptual to the experiential" — beyond recycling existing fabric and limiting development resources — and its disciplinary wager: "bring into the scope of architecture, work that is in danger of being done by others and/or pejoratively and arrogantly tossed to the side as unworthy of an architect's attention. Architectural practices need to embrace the realities of the cities in which they practice, and at the same time speculate on how to transform them and subsequently to transform our understanding of the architectural whole" (interior-design-vs-architecture debate).
The closing thesis: "Alteration can be seen as a way to resituate interiority in architecture, highlighting disjunctive capacities of alteration, while ushering postdigital themes relevant to the academy and cultural trends in the industry. If we can employ alteration to rethink the architectural whole, the future of interiority and its related praxes may open up fertile speculative realities."
The GFA political economy (note 12): "Ground Floor Area (GFA) calculations limit the economy of buildings in Hong Kong, which tend to prioritize the monetization of floor plate areas over design. As such, one sees an intensively Fordist production of housing throughout the city and over many decades limiting the extent to which architects can 'branch out.'" Hong Kong occupies one-third of its land; the remaining two-thirds are country parks on steep terrain, "an asset and economically unfeasible to develop" — the structural condition behind interiorization.
The Reader's own place in the canon (note 1): The Interior Architecture Reader is "among the first Readers to focus on the subject of interiors"; Taylor & Preston's Intimus (2006) "is perhaps the first and only a few others have been published to date," with Weinthal's Toward a New Interior (2011) among the few — an endnote that self-consciously dates the discipline's theory anthology.
Acknowledged provenance: portions of the chapter appear in Architectural Design's "Mass Customized Cities" and the DADA 2014 exhibition catalogue, "both written in collaboration with Clover Lee, Director, davidclovers, now plusClover" — the chapter's argument grown inside the mass-customization discourse (mass-customization).

Connections

Concepts: interiority (the chapter's central concept, defined as perception-state with degrees), interior-architecture (interiority as a disciplinary way to design interiors "explicitly architectural"), alteration (the chapter's coinage: centripetal, fine-grained, interiorized reconfiguration against adaptation's whole-system), adaptive-reuse (adaptation's marketing-ploy critique; the A+A work Hong Kong's practices take on), architectural-whole (the part-to-whole tradition the chapter undoes; "new types of wholes"), objecthood (Fried-derived, perceptual, graded), interiorized-object (objects that pull experience inward; involutions; the collective object), inside-outside-dialectic (interior/exterior topologies "no longer need to be smoothed out"), quasi-autonomous-interior (the "semi-autonomy of interiors and exteriors to coexist"; Lavin cited via note 3), heterogeneous-space ("amplifying the heterogeneity of the tower units"; "specificity, dexterity, and heterogeneity"), homogeneous-space (the "standardized and homogeneous" Arquitectonica towers; adaptation's "continuous, smooth, singular, and fully integrated approach"), interior-urbanism (the 21st-century interiorized city; Hong Kong), deconstruction (the 1988 MOMA show and the disjunctive revival), digital-architecture (software's continuity bias; the postdigital perspective), topology (the "topological city" as centrifugal and dying; centripetal vs centrifugal design), mass-customization (the AD "Mass Customized Cities" provenance; digitally prefabricated construction at Repulse Bay), modernism (Vitruvius-to-Le Corbusier whole; CIAM 9 breach), enclosure (the interior as "merely the other side of a building enclosure"), atmosphere ("diverse material assemblies and moods augment heterogeneity in experiences"), space ("new methods of space making"), assemblage (the "collection of interventions"; "composite of technological approaches"), plurality (disciplinary plurality integrating "product, graphic, and landscape design"; "a greater plurality of experience and effect").

Authors: David Erdman (the chapter's author; davidclovers co-founder), Gregory Marinic (the Reader's editor), Bernard Tschumi (Architecture and Disjunction — "perhaps most importantly" the disjunctive antecedent), Aldo Rossi (Architecture and the City, predecessor), Le Corbusier (Vers une architecture, the whole's modern reassertion); cited figures without pages: Sylvia Lavin (Kissing Architecture, "Current Kisses"), Michael Fried ("Art and Objecthood"), Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, Friedrich Kiesler, Kisho Kurokawa, Alison & Peter Smithson / Team 10, Tod Williams & Billie Tsien, Herzog & de Meuron, FOA (Yokohama Port Terminal), Arquitectonica, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Kengo Kuma, Peter Marino, Thomas Heatherwick, Joan Ockman, K. Michael Hays, Clover Lee (see log).

Debates: interior-design-vs-architecture — the chapter supplies a new position: alteration and interiority as the way to "embrace, rather than exile, interiors-based work from architecture," against work "pejoratively and arrogantly tossed to the side as unworthy of an architect's attention."

Related source notes: Public spheres: Hong Kong's interior urbanism (Solomon 2018) — the immediately preceding Reader chapter on the same city (ch. 48); Topology and interiority (Voordouw 2018) — the topological fold's interiority programme vs Erdman's dying topological city; Fabricating interiority (Manack 2018) — the interiority-as-fabrication thesis Erdman's perceptual interiority answers; (Re)constructing Histories (Hollis 2018) — the "practice of alteration" conception Erdman retools; Metropolitan hybrids (Luna 2018) — the metropolitan reuse register; Event-space (Hannah 2018) — the evental/fragment register Erdman's episodic interiors echo; Technologies (Carraher 2018) — the digital heterogeneous-space paradigm Erdman extends; Shape shifting (Taylor 2018) — the dynamic-interior contrast case; Internal disconnect (Marinic 2018) — the renovation-criticism register this chapter's alteration theory answers.

Direct Quotes

"If interiors are merely a category of professional work that occur on the inside of buildings, 'interiority' is the state of mind and perception induced by an architectural environment that is inwardly focused. An environment of this nature may have varying 'degrees of interiority' but is not limited to whether it is physically within or outside of a building."

"Interiority, a concept of increasing importance in urban centers today, allows architects to consider how to alter the state of various environments. It opens up a productively disciplinary way to design interiors, while still considering them explicitly architectural."

"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."

"architects have seen the interior as the inside (merely the other side of a building enclosure) instead of seeing its potential interiority."

"Young architects and architecture firms are often biased toward an overt preference for 'ground-up' work rather than interior-based work, suggesting an obsession with the 'architectural whole.'"

"Yet this compulsion to address the whole exhausts resources and capital – and to what end? Is wholeness really the penultimate goal of architecture?"

"One could argue that the 'topological city' with its highly continuous, centrifugal qualities (and the economies and politics that drive them) is a rare and dying breed."

"In the not-so-distant-future, cities will have to consider how to adapt and alter their existing structures to grow inward, to reconfigure their interior, and to design for the discontinuities and temporal layering of their urbanity."

"In many ways, it is more emblematic of a city of the twenty-first century (built out, episodic, layered, and interiorized) than it is of a late-twentieth-century city that is open, smooth, continuous, and free to grow outward."

"Driven largely by the desire to minimize risk by involving more than one designer, style, and brand, contemporary practices in development/financing (with its associated project briefs) call for this opposition. These are trends perpetuating environments that are intentionally and architecturally unresolved."

"Taken as a psychoanalytical corollary, the perception of a twenty-first-century city's interiority contrasts with the perception of its exteriority. This correlation could equally apply to the psyche of the contemporary urban subject, with their highly mediated and constructed exteriors (think Instagram, Facebook, etc.), that allow for a heightened contrast between their interior and exterior selves."

"The twenty-first-century city and its inhabitant subjects, it could be said, no longer expect part-to-whole relations to necessarily resolve themselves."

"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."

"Used more often as a marketing ploy than a conceptual opportunity, adaptation is, however, ripe for theoretical expansion and tectonic interrogation – particularly in relation to ideas of interiority."

"'Alteration,' on the other hand, opens up fresh discursive territory that builds upon the ideas of adaptation by affronting standardization – with a few distinctions. It is an approach that is somewhat more restrained, fine grained, and interiorized. Alteration could be called a more 'centripetal,' rather than 'centrifugal,' approach to design, one that pulls and tucks architecture into shape, rather than deforms a structure to adjust it to adjacencies."

"To a large extent, those theories are absent from digital architecture today due to an obsession with continuity and an intellectually stubborn insistence on designing the whole."

"To what extent do alteration and an emphasis on interiority allow us to rethink the architectural whole? 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? Does alteration allow for a way to engage new ways of thinking that embrace, rather than exile, interiors-based work from architecture?"

"Increasingly architecture practice takes on projects that are a mixed bag of scope involving one part architecture, one part interior, one part conservation, one part landscape, and one part product design (or some variation thereof)."

"Where adaptation is about objects adjusting to their surroundings, alteration is about reconfiguring the object's interior."

"Alteration has both the potential to maintain a degree of objecthood, and yet, in itself, is fragmentary and episodic. Altering is an exercise in adjusting select, disjointed areas – not the entire original object."

"objects are inserted within objects at some scales, while at other scales a multiplicity of objects (interior and exterior) are instrumentalized to collectively imbue a large-scale degree of objecthood."

"Each technique, I realized, invokes degrees of a perceptual interiority, which is not always manifested through an intervention on the inside."

"The quality of objects in that context shifted; seeking out ways to pull experience into them rather than showing off their qualities exuberantly up front – or on the exterior. The use of minor and major forms of involutions ranging from subtle, concave facades to deep, thick, figured interiors, was a method of spinning context inward."

"what distinguishes them are these interiorized objects and their centripetal qualities, a quality that breeds a semi-autonomy reinforcing the episodic and interventionist characteristics between them."

"the project brief aimed at amplifying the heterogeneity of the tower units while simultaneously imbuing the property at large with a greater sense of cohesion."

"The project illustrates the potential of the disjunctive to produce a new type of spatial fabric that is cohesive yet agile and formed out of a series of disconnected interventions. To this extent, the project is different from an adaptation, which strives ardently for the production of a singular, autonomous whole."

"The ensemble of interventions never fully integrates or makes the site whole, yet incrementally they produce enough pressure and tension to tether remote and unconnected experiences to one another."

"Alteration may also unleash other types of resources, from the conceptual to the experiential."

"bring into the scope of architecture, work that is in danger of being done by others and/or pejoratively and arrogantly tossed to the side as unworthy of an architect's attention."

"Alteration can be seen as a way to resituate interiority in architecture, highlighting disjunctive capacities of alteration, while ushering postdigital themes relevant to the academy and cultural trends in the industry. If we can employ alteration to rethink the architectural whole, the future of interiority and its related praxes may open up fertile speculative realities."

[note 2] "From Vitruvius's 'Ten Books on Architecture' (1500s – precise date of publication unknown) to Le Corbusier's Vers Une Architecture (Toward a New Architecture – 1923), the architectural whole is reasserted as a primary goal for the beauty, function, and pleasure of architectural design. 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."

[note 8] "[Friedrick Kiesler's Endless House project (1950) and] the Nakagin Capsule Tower by Kisho Kurokawa (1972), both of which can be seen as benchmark projects using the subject of biological adaptation to underpin their form, geometry, and massing."

[note 9] "Largely formed in a predigital era, the projects associated with these theories were explosive fields of objects that were syntactically related but conceived as separate autonomous follies. With the advent of digital computing, continuity and wholism became increasingly important… The benefit of looking back at this work after twenty years of smooth and continuous digital projects is to embrace the agility of the fragment and the disjunctive while trying at the same time to explore how those interventions do not remain entirely separate follies but instead form new types of more complex architectural wholes."

[note 10] "Fried's article discusses objecthood as a predominately perceptual and sensual idea within the practices and aesthetics of art – something more directly aligned to architecture and its potential praxes when compared with Graham Harmon's Triple O, Meillasoux, and philosophical discussions of Kant's object of knowledge… Fried's discussion of objecthood is explicitly more experiential and architectural."

[note 12] "Ground Floor Area (GFA) calculations limit the economy of buildings in Hong Kong, which tend to prioritize the monetization of floor plate areas over design. As such, one sees an intensively Fordist production of housing throughout the city and over many decades limiting the extent to which architects can 'branch out.'"

Open Questions

The title's "(e)" is never glossed. It most plausibly puns across states of mind ("the state of mind and perception"), estates (Hong Kong's housing estates and development estates — Repulse Bay, Bel-Air On The Peak), and the electronic mediation of the self ("highly mediated and constructed exteriors (think Instagram, Facebook, etc.)"). Does the chapter therefore imply three registers at once — altered perception, altered property, altered digital selves — and which carries the argument?
"Is wholeness really the penultimate goal of architecture?" — almost certainly intended as "ultimate," but read literally the question implies something beyond wholeness as the last goal. Is that literal reading productive — is alteration's "new type of whole" precisely the penultimate thing wholeness was standing in for?
Erdman explicitly prefers Fried's perceptual objecthood to Speculative Realism and OOO — a choice opposite in spirit to Odom's chapter, which positions itself "in the breach between… Gernot Bohme (Atmospheres) and Graham Harman (object-oriented ontology)" (cunning-of-cosmetics). Are there two viable object-theories for the interior (Fried's graded, perceptual one; Harman's flat, withdrawn one), and does interiority select between them?
"Degrees of interiority" is repeatedly invoked but never operationalized. What would a measure or scale of interiority be — perceptual (inward focus), geometric (involution depth), or economic (GFA constraint)? (interiority.)
Can "cohesion without integration" (the Repulse Bay ensemble) scale beyond Hong Kong's GFA-driven, multi-designer development market — or is alteration structurally an economy-specific practice? Would Erdman's program survive where whole-system adaptation still pays?
The chapter claims interiority and alteration open "fertile speculative realities" — yet the final section's "speculative realisms" is Fried-anchored and anti-OOO. Is the section title an intentional provocation against the philosophical movement, or a borrowing that confuses the two senses of "speculative"?
The acknowledgment ties the chapter to AD's "Mass Customized Cities" and the DADA 2014 catalogue co-written with Clover Lee — how much of the argument is co-authored, and how does alteration relate to the mass-customization discourse (the digitally prefabricated construction at Repulse Bay) it grew beside? (mass-customization.)
If "the topological city… is a rare and dying breed," what happens to the wiki's topological cluster (topology, topological-interiority, objectile) — is Erdman declaring the continuous surface era over at exactly the moment the Reader's other chapters theorize its interiority?