Spiritual and Secular Sections

David Salomon
Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY, USA
dsalomon@ithaca.edu

Keywords: theory, axis mundi, drawing, observatories

What do we call things that are present but can’t be detected by our senses? Answers include spirits, ghosts, ideologies, memories, and histories. Each of them can haunt a person’s, a discipline’s, a culture’s, or a city’s wellbeing. To help one recognize these-imperceptible entities one needs a device or person trained to communicate with them. Such instruments and people can collectively be understood as mediums. They can be psychics, artists, scientists, or historians. Sometimes they are technologies, or poems, or buildings, or images. Section drawings are one such device. 

Sections of bodies, buildings, machines, landscapes, and cities reveal the inner workings of things. They show the operable parts, organs, and infrastructures that would otherwise remain unseen and untouchable. Such images are apparitions, embodying the mysterious operations that effect performances and behaviors from an inaccessible place. (Emmons)

Unbounded from the physics of the everyday, section drawings can reveal more than the object they depict. The direct encounter with a thing such as the Thompson Center in Chicago (currently being renovated by Google) is limited by space, time, and your senses. One can either be underneath it (in the El), inside of it (in the atrium), or outside of it (on the street). All three of these positions can be encountered simultaneously in a section drawing. This is true of the conventional cross section through the building, but also the composite one done by Helmut Jahn’s office. The latter combines colorful plan and section images, while also evoking its connection to the ground and sky with its brown and blue washes. This all-at-once quality of sections brings it close to the logic of a painting, which are themselves static and passive yet require a temporal and dynamic engagement from the viewer to comprehend them. 

Figure 1: James R. Thompson Center (Credit: Jahn)

The abstract representation of the ground and sky in Jahn’s drawing are significant. They reveal another potential of sections. In presenting the subterranean and atmospheric realms it illustrates how sections represent, if not create connections between the heavens and the earth. In other words, it shows how sections perform as axis mundi. 

Axis mundi are said to identify a special place where the otherwise imperceptible sacred realm pierces the literal secular zone. (Eliade, Korom) They bring together the vast spaces and slow temporalities of the divine with the small and fleeting ones of mortals. Axis mundi are often associated with religious beliefs, landscapes, and buildings. They perform as cosmograms – a physical artifact that captures the universe in a single object or image. 

Section drawings like the one of the Thompson Center not only reveal the internal operations of the building, they also expose its connection to the surface streets of Chicago, the underground realm of the EL, and the atmosphere that envelopes the building. This section-as-axis mundi is not just spiritual cosmogram, it is an ecological and social one as well. That is, it is an image that embodies the contemporary relationship between the soil and the sky, geology and meteorology, ecology and sociology. Such drawings depict the spectral relationship between an architectural artifact’s connection to the different timescales that govern the physical, social, and ineffable forces present under, upon, and above the ground plane it exists in. 

Historical sections done by Alexander von Humbolt in the 19th century also meet these criteria, cutting through and depicting the geological, hydrological, and atmospheric information in graphic, written, and numeric formats in one synthetic image. So too do the speculative sections created by contemporary architects such as Design Earth. Their meticulous yet mysterious section-axon drawings extend beyond the sky and the soil as they dive inward towards the core of the earth and expand into outer space. Their drawings simultaneously show the different durations and associations present in these realms. These slices through the planet, the atmosphere, and the galaxy are synecdoche for the cosmos at large. 

Figure 2: Design Earth, Neck of the Moon, 2015 (Credit: Design Earth)

Such images reveal how the religious relationships between extreme temporalities and scales, from the instantaneous to the eternal, from the intimate to the infinite are still present in the aesthetic, physical, scientific, and environmental issues that preoccupy us today. The spiritual has not been replaced as much as it has been sublimated. 

This is perhaps best witnessed in astronomical and meteorological observatories. Section drawings of both ancient and contemporary versions of this typology reveal how they are literally anchored to the earth to stabilize their instruments. They also show how they are often placed at the highest points of sacred mountains. And they depict an attempt to communicate with forces and objects that are invisible to the naked eye and incomprehensible to the individual mind. As objects they gather physical information and produce a cosmology that places humans in direct relationship with the scale of the universe, of the becoming infinite of the cosmos. 

Figure 3: McMath Solar Telescope (Credit: SOM)

A deep section through an observatory establishes a spatial paradigm, an axis mundi, where humans and human knowledge are not placed at the center of the universe, but are instead located at one hyper-intense node within it. As such they create a historically specific relationship between humans, non-humans, and the unknown, aka the divine (Latour). The presence of these physical and ineffable things are rendered legible by a medium that can speculatively yet precisely cut through an observatory, a temple, a government building, or any other type of architecture, to expose that which cannot be detected by reason or sensation alone. 

References

  • Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Vol. TB 81. New York: Harper & Row, 1961.
  • Emmons, Paul. Drawing Imagining Building: Embodiment in Architectural Design Practices. 1st. New York: Routledge, 2019.
  • Korom, Frank J. “Of Navels and Mountains: A Further Inquiry into the History of an Idea.” Asian Folklore Studies 51, no. 1 (1992): 103–25. 
  • Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993.
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