Drawings of sections and drawing with sections1

Our era has been described as an age of divided representation , where the instrumental, rationalistic and commodifiable aspects of life have overthrown the ethical, creative and communicative ones that used to give meaning to human existence. 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 discusses the role that the drawings of sections can play in the way that we come to know, understand and interpret space. Although the paper uses architecture as its main entry point, it relates to various other design-oriented spatial disciplines (landscape architecture, urbanism, engineering, product design, geography, etc.). Methodologically, the paper cuts the discourse about sections in two distinct parts. The first one has to do with drawings of sections that come to describe an already existing structure ( drawings of sections). The second highlights the role that sections play during the designing of new things – things that do not yet exist – in order to bring them into being ( drawing with sections). With the proposed distinction the paper calls us to rethink sections, from a mere outcome of the design process, to the design process per se.