| The primary problem with the built environment today is a lack of integration among its parts. I call this tectonic individualism, where the phrase indicates that building projects are undertaken under an object, or individualist, metaphysical view, namely that there are only, in architecture, individual buildings or design projects, and not larger forms of which buildings are actually parts. Along with the "view" that the important units of the environment are the atoms of it---houses, office buildings, in short the tectonic individuals---the ocular bias undermined the possibility of an environment being anything but an ideally empty space in which individual projects, motivated by client programs, could be built.; The idea that there are parts of an environment is already a philosophical problem. That something is whole is not given. Of the many way to conceptualize the world and the contents of it, neither 'object' nor 'ideation' suffice since both are partial perspectives on what is. Hence I deploy a different terminology, borrowed largely from the tradition of phenomenology: things, phenomena, sense and phenomenal field. Whatever is, makes sense because it is precisely not separable from a field of appearing---the field of phenomena---in which it makes sense. That is what it is for something to be a thing. But to be a thing is also necessarily to be whole. After dealing with two phenomenologies of wholes and parts, I develop my own understanding of wholeness, drawing from Buddhist ideas and further phenomenological analysis to develop a new concept---that of holomereosis, the structure of sense-references in which all things exist, a structure that is based on the whole-part relation but expands this relation asymmetrically. The upshot is that a whole is indeed more than its parts, but that this is not a numerical plurality. It is what I call ontological plurality.; Where chapter two focused on wholeness in what could just as well be items, chapter three treats of what is wholeness in process or events: namely, systems. The topic of chapter four switches from wholes found in the world to the whole that one is. Chapter five depends in part on developing a portion of the practice theory of Ted Schatzki vis a vis the holomereotic structure of things and events that I described in chapters two and three. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
