Holland Seropian
Kevin Xu
Stan Allen introduces the notion of the indeterminate whole through his analysis of the Great Mosque of Córdoba, describing it as a spatial model that resists the classical aspiration toward totality. The mosque becomes the poster child of the field condition—an architecture where overall form emerges from the accumulation of local conditions. Independent elements are added sequentially, producing a whole that is not geometric or teleological but contingent and open-ended. There is no overarching formal scaffolding; only a fixed local syntax—a system of columns and bays repeated across a horizontal plane. Unlike the classical part-to-whole logic, in which fragments are shaped in service of a prefigured whole, here parts remain autonomous, un-subordinated, and capable of incremental extension.
More than a formal strategy, the field condition reimagines architecture as a system open to change, accident, and improvisation—an architecture that privileges contingency over permanence, flux over fixity. This framework becomes a lens through which to reconsider the typology of the library—not as a static repository, but as a civic institution recalibrated for contemporary networks of knowledge and culture. The contemporary library now stands in tension between its inherited form and its emergent civic role. It is no longer singular or hierarchical, but distributed, collaborative, and inherently indeterminate.
Our proposal draws from this logic of accumulation but introduces a key transformation. Where Córdoba unfolds in a single striated horizontal field, our project folds that field volumetrically—reorganizing its additive logic into a new sectional syntax. Local relationships are no longer confined to the plan but produce variation in elevation, volume, and ground condition. Nested interiorities and voids emerge from the act of folding, creating a choreography of spaces that maintain the additive spirit of the mosque while departing from its horizontal restraint.
This folding of the field produces a new architectural behavior—one that generates internal differentiation while preserving the indeterminacy of the whole. The library becomes a platform for civic interaction shaped not by symbolic centrality but by a distributed network of relationships. Zones of collection, collaboration, and cultural production interweave within a system of affective and spatial proximities.
Operating as a field of effects, the project resists closed composition, instead opening up to the forces of the city and the contingencies of its users. It stages an ongoing negotiation between the architectural and the urban, between ground and volume, stability and transformation. The indeterminate whole is not a fixed totality, but a spatial framework—loose, open, and perpetually reconfigured through difference.
