Description

Drawing from multiple disciplines, Lynch elaborates upon his distinct architectural approach he terms "holding together"

Fragments and Coherence is a monograph of original projects and a gentle manifesto on complexity and coherence in architecture. Peter Lynch, former Architect-in-Residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art and Guest Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, presents 20 key projects from three decades of design practice in New York, Beijing and Stockholm. In project descriptions and essays Lynch examines works of architecture, landscape design, music, literature and painting that have been fashioned through "holding together"--an approach to composition that derives the structure of a work from the character of its parts. Beethoven's Late Quartets, T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land," Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass, Hadrian's Villa, the Yuanmingyuan, Eileen Gray's Villa E-1027, John Hejduk's "Victims" projects and Lynch's own Timescape Garden are some examples. The author proposes a relationship between this way of making things and philosopher Giorgio Agamben's notion of singularity. Works made up of disjunct elements, reconciled with each other according to their natures, are often singular: examples of themselves alone, not encompassed by any category or rule.
Former head of the graduate department of architecture at Cranbrook Academy of Art and guest professor at Penn State University and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Peter Lynch has taught at Harvard, Columbia, Rhode Island School of Design, City College of New York and Parsons School of Design. This collection of projects and critical essays draws on 30 years' experience in architecture research, teaching and practice.