Sectioning
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clockwise from top left: William Massie, Playa Urbana/Urban Beach, MoMA/P.S.1, Queens, New York, 2002. Photo: William Massie
Playa Urbana/Urban Beach. Detail of steel rib. Photo: William Massie SHoP Architects, Dunescape, 2001. Plot files of cross sections used for construction layout. Photo: SHoP Architects Dunescape. Installation. Photo: SHoP Architects
system into laser-cut steel fins threaded with exposed PVC tubing, creating the effect of diaphanous surfaces of flowing plastic hair that create shade and accommodate program. The sensuous lines are a constructive solution that cumulatively define the larger surfaces and representationally echo the digital method that made them. That is, the lines define the physical surface in the same way that embedded surface curves, or isoparms, make up a digitally ruled, or lofted, one. Massie’s method coordinates well with conventional building materials. Standard materials typically come as sheets, so that three-dimensional buildings are made from two-dimensional materials. In the case of sectioning, the constructional techniques that have emerged include sectional ribbing (as in the projects already described), lamination or parallel stacking, and waffle-grid construction. In the case of parallel stacking, the frequency of the sections required to approximate the increasingly varied surface geometries increases, sometimes resulting in a visual intensification of material. By using edge profiles to describe surface through implied visual continuities, architects have
taken advantage of sectioning—both to merge and to perceptually elevate the relationship of form with material tectonic. A good example of this merging and perceptual elevation is Dunescape, the project that won MoMA/ P.S.1’s Young Architects Program the year before Massie’s Playa Urbana/Urban Beach. Designed and built by by SHoP Architects, Dunescape is an architecturalized landscape built completely as a series of parallel, stacked dimensional lumber. While manual labor was required to cut, assemble, and fasten the pieces in the actual construction, the methodology was completely digitally driven. First, the digital model was sectioned at intervals that were established by the given material thickness. The resulting section drawings were then plotted at full scale and used as templates on which to lay out and position each wood piece. Not insignificantly, SHoP used this very same technique to make a scaled model in the digital file submitted for the competition presentation—a convincing testament to this particular technique’s fluidity, scalability, and credibility. The substantial rhetoric that has surrounded digital fabrication toward the streamlining of