Holistics, sustainability and architecture

The term “holistic” tends to designate a disciplinary approach that attempts to grasp complex systems and interactions between the parts of a problem. Its current application however shows a reduction of its cultural complexity and full scope. It was the South African statesman General Jan Christian Smuts (1870 –1950) who invented the term. For Smuts, holism expressed a tendency towards Totality. Smuts criticised Cartesian reductionism and put forward the hypotheses that the relations between parts are not linear and that the whole is superior to the sum of the parts composing it. The debate and violent, tragic contrasts between the culture of difference and universalist rationalism, between the idea of progress and the conservation of traditions, between mechanistic utilitarianism and ancestral spirituality, are constants on which our culture is founded. Today sustainable development seeks to displace this cultural dichotomy. The values of tradition and progress, of the trans-generational heritage against the daily guzzling of resources, and of difference and universalism, can all converge towards a unitary way of thinking, which is simultaneously global and local, traditional and innovative and respectful of individual and community values. In this global perspective, architecture stands out as the sole discipline capable of taking responsibility for the safeguard and defence of the physical world. This position implies an anti-reductionist and extensive vision of architectural studies as exclusively “disciplinary” and maybe a renewal of the concept of Concinnitas, a term used by Alberti in De re aedificatoria (1452) to define the harmony between parts and with the whole.