Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses the importance that the drawings of sections play in the way that various design-oriented disciplines understand and produce space, especially architecture in the digital era.

Paper long abstract:

Every conventional architectural drawing is a section. Despite the fact that this simple truth is common knowledge, very little research has been accomplished towards understanding the nature of 'cutting' that designers habitually do during their design processes .

Nevertheless, our era has been described as an age of 'divided representation' (Vesely 2004), where the instrumental, rationalistic and commodifiable aspects of life have overthrown the ethical, creative and communicative ones that used to give meaning to human life. This schism has led to the fact that representations have lost their power to re-present things meaningfully and have become mere ghosts of reality -often by rejecting it overall.

This paper puts forth the hypothesis that understanding space through sections is the outcome of the way that western culture has been defining knowledge and the way that it has been approaching education. Moreover, it suggests that the drawing of cross-section is a special tool, that was invented during the late Middle Ages or early Renaissance in western Europe, influenced by humanistic education and the flourish of human anatomy in the universities of the time. The hypothesis focuses then on contemporary architectural education to argue that new technologies and Computer Aided Design challenge the dominancy of this paradigm.

The paper will provide evidence of current design studio educational practices from the design studio in architecture in order to show the way that 'cutting' is applied through new media and Computer Aided Design.