Peter Trummer disavows any ambition to answer the question posed by his lecture title, offering instead a survey of architectural history as seen through specific interpretations relating to issues of mass, form and part to whole relationships. He begins with a discussion of antiquity through the French 18th century in terms of ideas of Riegl, Alberti, Wölfflin, and Kaufmann. He argues that this period ended with an architecture with parts, consisting of autonomous objects. In his review of different modernist traditions, Trummer contrasts part to whole relationships in Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. He argues that Paul Klee of the Bauhaus period developed an analysis of point, line, plane, and volume that remains relevant to current discussions. He discusses Loos’s notion of architecture as the gathering of space as developed by Hans Hollein. Trummer concludes with an overview of architecture from postmodernism to now, discussing John Hejduk, O. M. Ungers, Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman, Greg Lynn, Hernan Diaz Alonso, Rem Koolhaas, and Bernard Tschumi. He outlines his own interest in the possibility of a post-human architecture of no content and no form.
