10. The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole
Toledo [Ohio] was very beautiful
An architecture of complexity and accommodation does not forsake the whole. In fact, I have referred to a special obligation toward the whole because the whole is difficult to achieve. And I have emphasized the goal of unity rather than of simplification in an art "whose . . . truth [is] in Its totality.” It is the difficult unity through inclusion rather than the easy unity through exclusion. Gestalt psychology considers a perceptual whole the result of, and yet more than, the sum of its parts. The whole is dependent on the position, number, and inherent characteristics of the parts. A complex system in Herbert A. Simon’s definition includes "a large number of parts that interact in a non-simple way.” 46 The difficult whole in an architecture of complexity and contradiction includes multiplicity and diversity of elements in relationships that are inconsistent or among the weaker kinds perceptually.
Concerning the positions of the parts, for instance, such an architecture encourages complex and contrapuntal rhythms over simple and single ones. The "difficult whole” can include a diversity of directions as well. Concerning the number of parts in a whole, the two extremes—a single part and a multiplicity of parts—read as wholes most easily: the single part is itself a unity; and extreme multi-plicity reads like a unity through a tendency of the parts to change scale, and to be perceived as an overall pattern or texture. The next easiest whole is the trinity: three is the commonest number of compositional parts making a monumental unity in architecture.
But an architecture of complexity and contradiction also embraces the "difficult” numbers of parts—the duality, and the medium degrees of multiplicity. If the program or structure dictates a combination of two elements within any of the varying scales of a building, this is an architecture which exploits the duality, and more or less resolves dualities into a whole. Our recent architecture has suppressed dualities. The loose composition of the whole used in the "binuclear plan” employed by some architects right after the Second World War, was only a partial exception to this rule. But our tendency to distort the program and to subvert the composition in order to disguise the duality is refuted by a tradition of accepted dualities, more or less resolved, at all scales of building and planning—from Gothic portals and Renaissance windows to the Mannerist facades of the sixteenth century and Wren’s complex of pavilions at Greenwich Hospital. In painting, duality has had a continuous tradition—for example, in compositions of the Madonna and Child and of the Annunciation; in enig¬matic Mannerist compositions such as Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation (208); and in the recent work of Ellsworth Kelly (209), Morris Louis (210), and others.
Sullivan’s Farmers’ and Merchants’ Union Bank in Columbus, Wisconsin (211), is exceptional in our recent architecture. The difficult duality is prominent. The plan reflects the bisected inside space which accommodates the public and the clerks on different sides of the counter running perpendicular to the facade. On the outside the door and the window at grade reflect this duality: they are themselves bisected by the shafts above. But the shafts, in turn, divide the lintel into a unity of three with a dominant central panel. The arch above the lintel tends to reinforce duality because it springs from the center of a panel below, yet by its oneness and its dominant size it also resolves the duality made by the window and the door. The fagade is composed of the play of diverse numbers of parts—single elements as well as those divided into two or three are almost equally prominent—but the fagade as a whole makes a unity.
Gestalt psychology also shows that the nature of the parts, as well as their number and position, influences a perceptual whole and it also has made a further distinction: the degree of wholeness can vary. Parts can be more or less whole in themselves, or, to put it in another way, in greater or lesser degree they can be fragments of a greater whole. Properties of the part can be more or less articulated; properties of the whole can be more or less accented. In the complex compositions, a special obligation toward the whole encourages the fragmentary part or, as Trystan Edwards calls it, the term, "inflection.”
Inflection in architecture is the way in which the whole is implied by exploiting the nature of the individual parts, rather than their position or number. By inflecting , toward something outside themselves, the parts contain their own linkage: inflected parts are more integral with the whole than are mnflected parts. Inflection is a means