Fragments and Coherence

An in-depth exploration of Peter Lynch's architecture spanning three decades of practice, teaching, and writing. Fragments and Coherence is also an inquiry into a compositional approach that the author calls "holding together," practiced in many creative disciplines. Beethoven's Late Quartets, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Marcel Duchamp's "Large Glass," Hadrian's Villa, the Humble Administrator's Garden, Scarpa's Brion Vega Cemetery, and Peter Lynch's own Timescape Garden are all examples. In each case the work's overall structure arises from the holding-together of heterogeneous parts. The book proposes a relationship between this way of making things and philosopher Giorgio Agamben's notion of singularity. Works made up of disparate, disjunct elements, reconciled with each other according to their natures, are often singular- examples of themselves alone, not encompassed by any category or rule.