Architecture in a Fragmented World: From Metaphysical Division to the Crisis of the Built Environment

This essay is a lecture text "Architecture in a Fragmented World", delivered online on the 7th Nov 2025, as part of "Desilo Architecture Talks" series by Dr Zaky Jaafar.

Introduction: Fragmentation as a Mode of Modern Knowing

Fragmentation began as a cognitive method that allowed human beings to understand the world by dividing its complexity into manageable parts. It emerged early in philosophical inquiry as a strategy for clarity, classification, and pedagogy. Over time, however, this method evolved into an intellectual habit that stretched far beyond philosophy. It shaped the sciences, economics, theology, and ultimately architecture and urbanism. What began as a way of knowing gradually became a way of being. The built environment—our cities, buildings, and infrastructures—became physical expressions of a worldview that privileges separation, functional isolation, and reduction. In the post-Enlightenment world, fragmentation matured into a cultural condition that influenced how societies organise knowledge, labour, space, and meaning. This essay traces the intellectual genealogy of that condition and examines how fragmentation has shaped architectural history, culminating in modernist, postmodernist, and contemporary practices. It also explores current attempts at re-integration and defragmentation, offering possibilities for a renewed architectural ontology grounded not in rupture but in coherence.

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Early Philosophical Fragmentation: Analysis within Unity

Long before the Enlightenment, fragmentation functioned within a metaphysical framework that maintained an overarching unity. Early Islamic philosophers such as al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and al-Ghazali employed analytical distinctions—*tafsīl*—as temporary steps within a broader quest for integration—*jamʿ*.

Al-Farabi’s *Iḥṣāʾ al-ʿUlūm* divided the sciences into logic, physics, metaphysics, mathematics, and politics, yet this classification never erased the unity of knowledge under the canopy of *tawḥīd*. For him, the purpose of categorisation was clarity, not ontological separation. All branches of knowledge ultimately converged toward the perfection of the intellect and the pursuit of happiness, understood as the knowing of the Divine. Fragmentation was therefore a pedagogical structure that enabled the ascent toward metaphysical wholeness.

Ibn Sina continued this intellectual architecture in *Al-Shifāʾ*, where he organised the sciences into an ordered epistemological hierarchy. While the sciences were differentiated by subject matter and method, he insisted that they converged toward the same intellectual horizon. Fragmentation for Ibn Sina was a ladder—*sullam*—which enabled the soul to climb from multiplicity toward unity. The analytic process (*tafsīl*) clarified, but synthesis (*jamʿ*) conferred meaning.

Al-Ghazali’s critique of philosophers did not reject analytic fragmentation; rather, he sharpened it. In *Al-Munqidh min al-Ḍalāl*, he examined competing schools of thought by dissecting their arguments until he reached certainty. His method was one of spiritual purification, stripping away assumptions to recover truth grounded in direct experiential knowledge—*maʿrifah*. He divided in order to reunify; he analysed in order to heal.

In classical antiquity, Aristotle also employed forms of epistemological fragmentation. His categorical divisions and analytic approach to causes produced the first systematic separation between knower and known. In architecture, this shift manifested in Greek temples, where form and proportion reflected rational observation rather than mythic participation. Yet even Aristotle’s analytic cosmos maintained teleology and purpose. Fragmentation had not yet solidified into the dualisms that would later dominate modern thought.

Medieval Scholasticism, particularly in the synthesis of Thomas Aquinas, further structured reality into hierarchies of reason, revelation, and sensory faculties. Gothic cathedrals expressed this worldview in stone and light. They organised spiritual hierarchy into spatial form, preserving unity but compartmentalising it. The seeds of fragmentation were present, but unity remained intact.

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The Modern Rupture: Dualism and the Rise of Mechanistic Fragmentation

The 17th century marked the decisive turn. With Descartes, Bacon, Galileo, and Newton, fragmentation ceased to be a method within unity and became the organising principle of the modern worldview.

Descartes’ mind–body dualism split existence into *res cogitans* (thinking substance) and *res extensa* (extended substance). This ontological rupture separated knowing from being and transformed nature into an object for measurement and manipulation. It enabled extraordinary scientific progress, but at the price of reducing the world to mechanical extension. This metaphysical wound uniquely shaped modern architecture, which began to privilege rational geometry, control, and surveillance over symbolic coherence and embodied experience. Descartes maintained belief in a single divine truth, but he placed metaphysics outside the method of scientific inquiry, beginning the gradual exile of unity from knowledge.

Francis Bacon reinforced this epistemic shift by insisting that knowledge must begin with the empirical isolation of variables. He broke with holistic metaphysics in favour of experimental control, making analytic fragmentation the foundation of scientific method. By treating phenomena as discrete, measurable units, he laid the groundwork for scientific objectivity but also entrenched reductionism.

Isaac Newton’s contribution pushed fragmentation further into the structure of scientific truth. By reducing celestial and terrestrial motion to universal mathematical laws, Newton demonstrated the immense power of treating reality as a system of quantifiable relationships. His triumph encouraged the belief that the world could be mastered through mathematics and experiment, detaching physical explanation from metaphysical significance. The price of this certainty was the further separation of matter from meaning.

The Enlightenment solidified these divisions. Kant, though not rejecting metaphysics, relocated it beyond the reach of empirical reason. Knowledge became tied to what could be experienced through the senses and structured by the mind’s categories. Metaphysics survived only as moral or aesthetic reflection, while scientific truth claimed the mantle of reality.

By the 19th century, Positivism and materialism completed the conceptual exile of metaphysics. Comte declared that only observable, measurable facts counted as knowledge. Marx, in his materialist writings, grounded reality in economic and material conditions, reducing ideas to reflections of social structures. Universities reorganised knowledge into empirical silos, marking the final dissociation between science and metaphysics. Nietzsche recognised this as a civilisational crisis: the loss of transcendence and unity created a vacuum of meaning, an existential fragmentation at the heart of modern culture.

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Cognitive, Social, and Epistemological Fragmentation

The intellectual divisions of the modern era generated deep cultural consequences. T. S. Eliot lamented that the modern West had fractured its intellectual life into isolated specialisms, severing knowledge from wisdom. Fritjof Capra criticised the Cartesian worldview for separating human beings from nature, reducing the world to fragmented mechanical systems. Iain McGilchrist argued that Western civilisation is dominated by left-hemispheric modes of attention—abstract, analytic, and disembodied—while marginalising the integrative capacities of the right hemisphere. Émile Durkheim observed that social cohesion decayed as moral frameworks weakened, leaving individuals estranged from community and self.

Together, these thinkers reveal a civilisation structured around division: philosophical fragmentation separating mind from matter, technological fragmentation subordinating human meaning to mechanical function, sociological fragmentation dissolving community, and epistemological fragmentation reducing truth to measurable fact. These fractures increasingly shaped the built environment.

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Industrial Fragmentation: Labour, Space, and the Loss of Wholeness

The Industrial Revolution turned metaphysical fragmentation into a lived condition. Adam Smith’s account of the division of labour described how breaking tasks into specialised parts produced unparalleled efficiency. His pin-factory example demonstrated the productivity of reducing human activity into repetitive operations. Yet Smith himself recognised the cost: workers became intellectually stunted, performing mechanical tasks that fragmented their skills, bodies, and imaginations.

Pre-industrial societies had integrated work and life within households and small workshops. Craftsmanship preserved holistic skill and social meaning. The guild system regulated quality and trained apprentices within community structures. Production was local, limited, and embedded in daily life.

Industrialisation ruptured these arrangements. Work moved from home to factory. Time was measured by the clock rather than by natural rhythms. Machines dictated pace and organisation. Communities lost agency over production, becoming dependent on distant owners and global markets. Marx described this condition as alienation: labour ceased to express human essence and instead became a means of survival. The worker felt human only outside of work, and alienated while performing it.

Spatially, industrialisation materialised these divisions. Cities separated industrial, commercial, and residential zones. Domestic life detached from economic production. Public and private realms hardened into distinct spheres. The built environment reflected and reinforced the fragmentation of humanness.

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Architectural Fragmentation: From Rational Abstraction to Ontological Ruin

Architecture in the modern period became a primary site for the expression of fragmentation. Modernism, postmodernism, and contemporary movements reveal a trajectory from the optimism of rational purity to the dissolution of form, meaning, and presence.

The Enlightenment’s fascination with universal geometry produced architectural visions such as Boullée’s *Cenotaph for Newton*, a monumental sphere symbolising cosmic rationality. Ledoux’s Ideal City of Chaux treated urban space as a diagram of social order, privileging abstraction over lived experience. These works represented the triumph of the mind over the body—architecture as conceptual object rather than embodied environment.

The industrial era produced new building types—factories, prisons, schools, hospitals—designed according to principles of efficiency, surveillance, and control. Bentham’s Panopticon exemplified the Enlightenment’s mechanistic view of the body as an entity to be observed and regulated. Architecture became a machine for managing bodies rather than nurturing human life.

The early 20th century intensified this rationalism through the modernist attack on ornament. Adolf Loos condemned ornamentation as wasteful and degenerate, arguing that cultural progress required the purification of form. His position influenced Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and the International Style, which championed functional clarity, material honesty, and geometric purity. Yet stripping buildings of ornament also stripped them of cultural and symbolic density. Modernism produced clarity but often at the expense of emotional resonance.

Brutalism further intensified the exposure of material as architectural truth, using raw concrete to express honesty. But this material sincerity frequently resulted in existential silence—mass without meaning, presence without narrative.

Postmodernism attempted to reintroduce meaning through context, symbolism, and playful historical reference. Architects like Robert Venturi and Michael Graves challenged modernist purity with complexity and contradiction. Yet their symbolic gestures could not restore a lost metaphysical centre; meaning became fragmented into pluralised signs.

Deconstructivism pushed architectural fragmentation to its philosophical limit. Influenced by Derrida’s notion of *différance*, deconstructivist architecture rejected stable form, hierarchy, and coherence. Structures such as Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin embraced rupture, void, and dislocation. These buildings functioned as physical metaphors for a world without metaphysical ground. They succeeded in critiquing architectural certainties but failed to reconstruct a new ontology. Architecture became an aestheticised ruin—a theatre of fragments without centre or coherence.

Parametric architecture, championed by Patrik Schumacher, presented itself as a cure through computational continuity. Yet its smooth, algorithmically generated forms unified data points rather than human meanings. The result was visual coherence but existential fragmentation: a technologically integrated yet humanly disconnected architecture.

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Urban Fragmentation: Zoning, Suburbia, and the Spatialisation of Separation

Modern urban planning institutionalised fragmentation at the scale of the city. Zoning emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries to separate noxious industrial uses from residential neighbourhoods. The 1916 New York Zoning Resolution codified functional separation and transformed Manhattan’s skyline through setback envelopes. While intended for public health, zoning entrenched the Cartesian logic of dividing space into discrete functional categories—residential, commercial, industrial, civic—reflecting the broader epistemological fragmentation of modernity.

Le Corbusier’s *Ville Radieuse* embraced and amplified this logic. The rational city was imagined as a triumph of order, efficiency, and clarity. Yet its vast separation of functions produced sterile environments devoid of street life. The Corbusian model inspired post-war planning and contributed to global patterns of suburban sprawl.

Suburbia intensified spatial fragmentation by separating home from work, living from production, and humans from nature. Nature became scenery rather than ecological participation. Low-density zoning required automobile dependency, generating environmental costs through fossil fuel consumption, land use expansion, impervious surfaces, and energy-inefficient housing. Suburbia was celebrated as moral progress but produced landscapes of disconnection.

Hostile architecture—benches designed to prevent lying down, spikes installed to deter loitering, fragmented seating—revealed the moral dimension of urban fragmentation. Public spaces were divided into zones of belonging and exclusion. Market values eclipsed social responsibility, turning the city into a mechanism of deterrence rather than care.

Fragmentation and Bureaucracy: The Iron Cage of Rationality

At the organisational level, Max Weber identified bureaucracy as a system that fragments humanness by reducing individuals to roles within an impersonal hierarchy. Rules, efficiency, and calculability replaced empathy and judgment. Workers performed narrow tasks disconnected from broader purpose. The self split into private and official identities. Creativity and moral responsibility diminished under procedural obedience.

Weber’s metaphor of the “iron cage” describes a world where rationality becomes self-perpetuating, trapping individuals within systems that prioritise function over meaning. Kafka’s *The Castle* dramatised this condition: a land surveyor attempts to navigate an opaque bureaucracy that generates confusion rather than order. M. C. Escher’s lithograph *Relativity* visualised a world where logic itself becomes labyrinthine—an architecture of cognitive fragmentation.

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Reintroduction of Metaphysics: 20th-Century Correctives

Despite the dominance of mechanistic fragmentation, the 20th century witnessed attempts to restore metaphysical depth. Heidegger criticised modern science for forgetting the question of Being, urging a return to the ontological ground of existence. Alfred North Whitehead proposed a process cosmology in which reality consists not of substances but events in relationship—a relational ontology that challenged fragmentation. Niels Bohr’s principle of complementarity revealed that opposites such as wave and particle, subject and object, are mutually necessary aspects of reality. Quantum physics reunited observer and observed, dissolving the rigid distinctions of classical atomism. These intellectual movements reopened possibilities for integration and relational thinking.

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Defragmenting Architecture: Toward Integrated Urban Futures

Contemporary architecture and urbanism have begun exploring ways to heal the fractures inherited from modernity.

The 15-Minute City concept, associated with Carlos Moreno, proposes neighbourhoods where essential needs—work, school, commerce, recreation—lie within a short walk. This model revives the human scale, reintegrates daily life, and counters suburban sprawl. It resonates with Ebenezer Howard’s early Garden City ideals and Jane Jacobs’ defence of walkable, mixed-use streets.

Cedric Price’s unbuilt Fun Palace rejected fixed programmatic hierarchies, envisioning a dynamic structure that users could reconfigure. It critiqued institutional rigidity and anticipated cybernetic, participatory design approaches.

Mixed-use towers such as Marina City in Chicago or One Central Park in Sydney represent vertical reintegration of living, working, and ecological functions. They challenge the legacy of zoning by combining multiple urban programs within a single architectural system.

The open-plan experiments of Frank Lloyd Wright sought to dissolve barriers to communication and collaboration. While such spaces risk turning openness into surveillance, their integrative potential remains significant for education and creative work.

Community-oriented initiatives such as Rural Studio in the United States and the Community Architecture Research Team (CART) at Universiti Putra Malaysia reconnect architectural education with lived realities of marginalised communities. They emphasise moral responsibility, hands-on learning, and sustainable material practices.

Yap Ying Ying’s work on desiloising academic spaces proposes campus environments that facilitate interdisciplinary encounters and dissolve disciplinary boundaries. Her principles—decentralisation, permeability, serendipity, and integration with nature—point toward a spatial metaphor for epistemic reintegration.

Floating University Berlin creates experimental spaces that blend academic research with public engagement, reconnecting theory with embodied, ecological practice.

Urban farming stands as a powerful symbol of defragmentation. It reunites life and form, matter and meaning, city and nature. By embedding food production within the urban fabric, it restores relational ties between humans, ecology, and the built environment.

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Conclusion: Beyond Fragmentation Toward Architectural Wholeness

Fragmentation has been central to human intellectual development. As a method, it sharpened clarity and enabled scientific progress. For early thinkers, fragmentation was always placed within a horizon of unity. But modernity transformed it into an ontological condition. The metaphysical separation between mind and body, the empirical isolation of variables, and the mechanistic reduction of reality produced a culture of disconnection. These intellectual shifts materialised into architectural and urban forms: rational machines, functional zoning, industrial workspaces, suburban landscapes, and hostile design.

The contemporary crisis of meaninglessness, ecological degradation, and social alienation is inseparable from this history. Yet at the same time, new movements—15-minute cities, community architecture, mixed-use urbanism, open and collaborative learning environments, and urban farming—offer pathways toward reintegration. They point toward an architectural future that restores coherence, meaning, and relationality.

To build in a fragmented world is to wrestle with the legacies of modernity. The task is not to abandon analysis but to embed it within a renewed commitment to unity. Architecture must once again become a field where matter and meaning, form and life, knowledge and being, are allowed to speak to one another. Only then can the built environment become a site of healing rather than division—a place where humanness is reassembled, and where the fragments of modernity find their path toward wholeness.

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