Zhou 1Peng Zhou.docx

Zhou 1
Peng Zhou
Prof. Macias
Eng 106B
Feb 27, 2017
Love
Love is an eternal topic, but what is love? As far as I am
concerned, love is the most mystical emotion in our heart which
makes us feel happy, satisfied or sad. Love is also the sincere
emotion springing from heart as the boiled water spilling out of
the kettle. Without love, our life will be gloomy and
insignificant; without love, the world is wilderness. Love is as
necessary in our life just as the thread in the quilt. Of course,
there are a lot of kinds of love, such as parental love, fraternal
love, romantic love, and so on. Parental love is the most
unselfish and greatest love in the world. We never know the
love of parents until we become parents ourselves. I still
remember one story about a squab and a hunting dog. While the
hunting dog was attacking the squab, the mother bird flew down
from the tree without hesitation to protect her baby and the
parental love made the dog gave in eventually. Animals can do
this, not to speak of us human beings. Our parents gave us life
and brought us up; they taught us to be good men and took care
of us without any complaint. This is parental love which will
protect and support us forever. A true friend is the one who
overlooks our failures and tolerates our successes. When we
meet difficulties, our friends will never look on with folded
arms. This is friendship which is a golden blossom between true
friends. It is said that the love story itself is not important; the
importance is that one is capable of love. For instance, Jack
promised Rose that he would never give her up. Another
Zhou 2

example is that Wale tried hard to protect Eve with clumsy
behaviors but genuine heart. This is romantic love which is like
a rose, bringing us happiness and sorrow. Above all, if life is a
quilt, love should be a thread. It can hardly be seen, but it really
exists. Without it, life becomes meaningless.
First of all, love is put one's heart and soul into her shoes. If
you love someone, you will do everything for her; you will
think on her side. You will reject all the temptations that can
make you live better, just because you don’t want to hurt her.
Secondly, love is forgiveness. No matter what the other one do
to you, you will forgive her at last. You won’t treat her eye for
eye. Although what she has done hurts you so much, you won’t
do the same thing to, because you love her. Thirdly, love is
growing old together. The outside word is so colorful, but what
you want is to grow old with her together and treasure every
minute with her. What’s more, you will leave a place for her
forever in your deep heart, even she has passed away.
Love is a kind of emotion that everyone has. It is around us. If
we pay attention, we will find it. So, do not lose the faith to
believe the existence of love. It is the feeling that every can feel
by heart.
For love, each person's definition is different, or it can be said
that every age group of people, different understanding of love.
In his teens, love is like a floating cloud in the sky, pure,
beautiful, gestures. That’s eager to love. When we are in
twenties, love like a flower cactus, bright, colorful, but from
time to time were injured. That’s accepted love. Thirty years
old, love like a roadside grass, it’s small, fragile and
inconspicuous. Suspicion of love; forty years old, love like
overdue bread, dark, rancid, nobody cares. That’s refused to
love. After the age of 50, love like a cup of boiled water, it is
colorless, tasteless, but pure and transparent. That’s experience
love.
Zhou 3
Love is actually just a synonym, its existence or does not exist,
beautiful or not beautiful, completely depends on everyone's

thinking. Not because of love has been hurt, then do not believe
in love. Is the sky floating in the rain, you no longer believed
that there will be sunshine later? I remember in an article to see
such a sentence: in love, who first moved the situation, which
lost. I think it is not perfect, the real love from beginning to end
are two things, not to say that a person to pay, another person is
to accept love. That kind of situation can only be said to pursue
the stage, or is unrequited love. Until the other side to accept
you, and willing to pay for you, can be regarded as love.
True love, like snow in the plum, proudly branches, colorful!
Regarding the term about love, I am in a strange and familiar
between, and did not use a hand to touch it. I do not like those
in the TV series who have gave up everything for love. Of
course, there are too many people in reality. In August last year,
I saw in the <Afternoon Tea> that a girl about twenty years old,
because her boyfriend fell in love with her friends and could not
bear to finally chose to jump from a high building, then die. She
was painful when she was dedicated to herself as an endless
desert, and she was also part of my sympathy. I saw her photos
and learned that the girl was so beautiful. But, but have you
ever thought that when you jumped from the building on the
second floor after your parents your loved ones your friends all
care about the people you love you, they will lose you because
you are more painful than you, sad.
I am sympathetic to her, but helpless. While her other feelings
also continue to be more intense, she was really silly. If you try
to die with their own boyfriend for their love, then she is really
wrong. If you love him, you will want him happy and happy, not
to force him to stay with his side. Can you see that you really
love him? I am sad for her, for her sad.
Zhou 4
In college life, such a thing is a lot of. I do not agree with the
practice of falling in love with middle school students. Some
students may think that as long as do not affect the study like,
the other does not matter. But this classmate, after all, only a

very small number, I believe how many will affect the mood.
And some students clearly understand puppy love for a healthy
body of mind, long learning long knowledge of their own is
wrong, but still cannot control their feelings, resulting in the
end of regret the end of the end. Unripe apples have bitter
astringent, to be mature and then picked down to taste and why
not?
Love is a constant ancient constant topic, because the
injured people are too many. It is true. For the existence of
eternal and long-term love, I am speechless. Are those stories of
Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, Romeo and Juliet really true or
just a beautiful and ancient legend? Those who died for the so-
called love in their mouths, and to be a lifetime of people,
probably only the middle of the students who do not dry milk
Mature middle-aged people, as long as they have a trace of faith
in love, love and the courage to pay, never favoritism, will
never leave all love their own people. They really understand
the meaning of love.
However, I still like to see the novel in the story of love
and twists and turns, like to listen to the ancient legend. After
listening and watching, I ever have to fantasy. I believe that the
reality of love is far less than the dream of a good dream of
romance, eternal. Perhaps, like me a born to break the curse of
the people, there are a few of the good?
All in all, love cannot eat. In the real society, romantic and
beautiful love only in the bread under the conditions of
sufficient to be achieved. Among the ten thousand people, can
be turned into a butterfly only one or no, and the other is to
Moth, cicada or other insects. It gives people too much regret,
pain, it does not rule out the happy. It is part of life, it will be
in their own hands, maybe one day that ten thousand of the pair
of butterflies you and your love is the most beautiful
incarnation.
Zhou 5
According to Hull, Gary. To love a person is selfish because it
means that you value that particular person, that he or she

makes your life better, that he or she is an intense source of joy-
-to you. A "disinterested" love is a contradiction in terms. One
cannot be neutral to that which one values. The time, effort and
money you spend on behalf of someone you love are not
sacrifices, but actions taken because his or her happiness is
crucially important to your own. Such actions would constitute
sacrifices only if they were done for a stranger--or for an
enemy. Those who argue that love demands self-denial must
hold the bizarre belief that it makes no personal difference
whether your loved one is healthy or sick, feels pleasure or
pain, is alive or dead.
All related to you are related to her, love means trusting the
person I love. If I love you, I trust that you will accept my
caring and my love and that you won’t deliberately hurt me. I
trust that you will find me attractive, and that you won’t
abandon me, I trust the mutual nature of our love. If we trust
each other, we are willing to be open to each other and reveal
our true selves.
Gray, Paul says that biologists and anthropologists assumed that
it would be fruitless, even frivolous, to study love's
evolutionary origins, the way it was encoded in our genes or
imprinted in our brains. Serious scientists simply assumed that
love -- and especially Romantic Love -- was really all in the
head, put there five or six centuries ago when civilized societies
first found enough spare time to indulge in flowery prose. The
task of writing the book of love was ceded to playwrights, poets
and pulp novelists.
According to religious beliefs, we are all created in the image
of God in His likeness and image. God created us to live life on
earth to the fullest. Despite being created by God, we all have
our own differences and beliefs.
Some believe that love is magical and one can feel it every time
he/she sees someone likes to the extent of claiming that they
feel butterflies in stomach. Whenever one get's near someone he
or she adores, one tends to sutter in words and gets queasy.
Scientist attribute this to hormones. It is hard to believe that the

word love has all this power over human beings.
Despite imperfections that a person may have, love see them
differently. Power of love is great enough to bring gods to their
knees. It is a lifetime experience and so much sensation. They
say love is sweet, filled with sparkling lights and romantic.
When one falls in love with someone, the whole world is
forgotten and the only thing that matters is that person. When
one knows that he or she is loved, it is always a wonderful
feeling.
When one falls in love, it is neither a crime nor a mistake.
However, if one confesses his or her feelings to another person
and get's rejected, one might think that he or she is alone in a
world that has already crashed. It is at that point that love
becomes crime and kills one's spirits. However, one should not
drown him or herself in love just because of unique treatment
and cared for wholeheartedly. The worst mistake in love is to
daydream or assume about what to expect.It only breaks
people's hearts since that expectations may never happen.In
love, it is always advisable to be on your own but enjoy the
company of people in love with. Life is short and there are no
chances of regrets.
Love controls everything on this earth. Love has no boundaries
or conditions. No one can tell exactly where love came from or
what it is. However, we are all nothing without love. Those
times when we feel shy and timid or afraid of expressing our
feelings tells that we are already in love. Power that makes one
to feel afraid of embarrassing another person. People rather
focus on using nice presents, smiles little notes and tears at
times. Some chose to stay quiet without speaking any word
while other times requires speaking to express feelings for
others. Impulsiveness is another method used to express love
while forgiveness also counts.
To sum it up, love is union under the condition of preserving
one’s individuality. In love, two beings become one and yet
remain two.

Zhou 6
Work cited
Gray, Paul. "What is Love?." Time, 141.7 (1993): 46.
Hull, Gary. "LOVE & SELFISHNESS; the False View of Love
as Selfless and Unconditional Destroys Its Sublime Value." The
Jacksonville Free Press, 18.4 (2004): 4.
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1. __ _
JAPANESE POSTURE is typified in this print by Harunobu
(1725·
1770), an artist best known for his scenes from the daily lives
of girls
and young men. This picture is called "The Beginning of
Spring,"
122
V1 7 � � I r (J)
n t
from the series "Customs of the Four Seasons." The man at left
has
struck a formal pose. Kneeling on the engawa, or porch, he in·
dicates to the young lady the first signs of an approaching
shower.

© 1957 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF POSTURE
Ivlan differs fron1 the apes by his standing posture, but this IS
only one among sonle 1,000 body position s of whjch he is
capable.
Here an anthropologist discusses their distl'iblltion and
rationale
The ways in which we sit, kneel or stand are determined not
only by the human anatomy but also by
culture. The peoples of the world differ
in posture styles just as they do in styles
of clothing, housing, cooking and music.
Yet curiously this important touchstone
of cultural differences has received little
serious attention from science. About 20
years ago the French sociologist Marcel
Mauss called attention to such matters
in a stimulating paper called "The Tech-
niques of the Body," but he did not go
much beyond the suggestion that their
investigation might open up a fertile
field for research on the borderline be-
tween cultm:e and biology. A few anthro-
pologists have written about the postural
habits of particular tribes or countries.
And that is about the limit of the litera-
ture on the subject.
It is hard to understand why students
of man and society have left this chap-

ter of his behavior so blank. Studies of
postural patterns could tell us a great
deal about man's biological and cultural
evolution. And the subject is not Witllout
practical importance. Postures and re-
lated motor-habits are intimately linked
with many aspects of daily life: they af-
fect the design of our clothing, footgear,
furniture, dwellings, offices, vehicles,
tools and machines. Moreover, they
speak an eloquent language in social
intercourse. Most of us look to postural
cues, as well as facial expressions and
speech itself, in our never-ending efforts
to interpret or evaluate people's motives,
moods or behavior.
Information on which to base a world-wide survey of postural
habits is
scarce, but sufficient to make at least a
beginning. Happily the anthropologists'
cameras often make up for omissions in
their notes. From their photographs and
by Gordon "'. J-lewcs
others it is possible to obtain a surprising
amount of information about postural
habits in many of the world's cultures.
One must take care not to be misled,
however, by posed or group pictures
of natives in which the photogra-
pher has lined up his subjects like mem-
bers of a baseball or basketball squad.
The older anthropological literature,
especially, contains a great many such

pictures, partly because of slow emul-
sions and poor lenses and partly because
of inability to break away from the tradi-
tion that having a picture made is a
situation calling for the greatest formal-
ity-a tradition which seems to have de-
veloped long before photography was
invented, and which is not limited to
Western civilization. In more recent pub-
lications there is a higher frequency of
candid shots, showing people in ordi-
nary positions and engaged in ordinary
tasks.
Other valuable sources of information
on posture are the paintings and sculp-
tures of the artists from all ages, taking
us back to the Stone Age. The sculptors
of ancient Greece produced anatomical-
ly realistic figures in a rather limited
range of postures-partly dictated by
their use of marble and other heavy
stone and partly by the monumental
function of so many of their works. The
art of ancient India depicts supernatural
beings, ascetics and other extraordinary
persons engaged in prayer, meditation,
religious dances or preparation for rit-
uals. Much the same thing is true of the
art of ancient China, Mexico, Peru and
Egypt. Painting and sculpture generally
tend to depict formalized, ceremonial,
idealized or otherwise artificial poses.
Ancient Egyptian art is particularly
noted for the rigid and unnatural pos-
tures of its figures. Nevertheless we have

more definite information on the every-
day postural habits of the Egyptians
than of any other ancient people. The
early Egyptians considerately left us lit-
tle models showing figures pulling at the
oars of boats, handling various tools,
butchering cattle, grinding grain, and so
forth.
For world-wide comparisons we must
limit ourselves to static postures-sitting,
syuatting, kneeling and standing-be-
cause the data on cultural differences in
body movements are still too scanty. The
human body is capable of assuming
something on the order of 1,000 different
steady postures. By "steady" we mean a
static position which can be maintained
comfortably for some time. Obviously
there are basic anatomical and physio-
logical factors which prevent us from
standing on our heads for any great
length of time, whatever our cultural
background. But aside from such limit8-
tions, it is surprising to see what a va-
riety of positions various peoples find
comfortable. Culture and training have
accustomed millions of people in the
world to sit restfully in postures which
to vVestern chair-sitters seem not only
bizarre but extremely uncomfortable.
There are, of course, postures which
can be considered universal, because
they are common in all cultures and

times. The ordinary upright stance, with
the arms hanging straight down or with
the hands clasped in front or behind,
certainly belongs in this category. Chair-
sitting does not, however. At least a
fourth of mankind habitually takes the
load off its feet by crouching in a deep
squat, both at rest and at work.
Fully aware of the limitations of our information, we have made
a pre-
liminary set of world maps showing the
distribution of various static postures.
Two of the maps are shown here [see
123
these two pages]. They represent data
from some 480 different cultures, 34 of
which belong to the past.
Chair-sitting and furniture, possibly
the chief distinguishing postural attri-
butes of Western civilization, go hand in
hand, though it is difficult to tell which
20 21 22
30
57 59 59.5

is cause and which effect-whether the
habit of sitting on a support led to the
invention of stools, benches and chairs
or vice versa. It is true that a rock, ledge,
log or house platform may serve as a
bench, but the fact is that people who
lack special furniture for the purpose
23 24 24
59.6 70 71 72
25
seldom sit the way we do. Growing up in
a "furnished" environment evidently fos-
ters sitting postures which the casual use
of rocks or logs does not. In Japan, where
people are accustomed to sit on the floor
at home, you will sometimes see a person
sitting on his heels on a seat in the thea-
25.5
73 74 75
POSTURE TYPES are shown in this sampling from the
classifica- among western American Indians. In the next row are
variations
tion scheme of Hewes. The figures numbered 301 through 306
(top of the one-legged Nilotic stance, found in the Sudan,
Venezuela
row on I.his page) are common resting positions; by contrast,
the and elsewhere. Chair-sitting (third row) spread from the
ancient

arm-on-shoulder postures of the next four figures are found
mainly Neal' East, but the Arabs there have replaced it with
floor-sitting
124
ter or a train. Among habitual chair-
sitters over the world there is a surpris-
ing variety of cultural differences in sit-
ting posture, many of which can be clas-
sified on the basis of the way the legs or
ankles are crossed.
Chairs, stools and benches were in use
� A �clb(,
88 89 89.5
in Egypt and Mesopotamia at least 5,000
years ago. While commoners and slaves
sat on stools or benches, the kings,
priests and other exalted personages in
ancient Egypt used chairs. The Chinese
began using chairs fairly late in their
history: 2,000 years ago they sat on the
�
100 101
II �
102

103 1 04 104.5 105 107
110 III III 113
�taz
121 121 122 123
JJ&�dn � jN
126.5 127 127 128
113 114
~
123.5 124
129
floor, as the Japanese and Koreans do
today. In southern and southeastern Asia
chairs have never become items of com-
mon use. Even in the Middle East and in
North Africa the Islamic peoples seem to
have returned to sitting on the floor-
possibly because of the cultural prestige
102 102 103
108 110
115 116
�&) � v �
125 125
postures (fourth and fifth rows). Sitting cross·legged (top row
on

this page) predominates south and east of Near Eastern
influence.
Sedentary kneeling postures (102 to 104) are typically Japanese;
sitting with the legs folded to one side (106 through 108) is a
femi·
nine trait, a rare exception being the male Mohave Indians. The
deep squat (fourth row on this page) is uncomfortable for adult
Europeans but replaces the sitting posture for at least a fourth
of
mankind. The last two rows show various asymmetrical
postures.
125
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@ ARCHAEOLOGICAL
CROSS·LEGGED POSTURES occur widely throughout
southern
Asia and aboriginal America, especially among men.
Complicated
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•
SITTING WITH LEGS EXTENDED is especially common
among
American Indians and in Melanesia. It is often used by women,
126
• •
variants such as the yoga or lotus posture (84) do not occur
outside Asia, where they are practiced by religious adepts .
• �
.
•
o • •
perhaps because it allows them to hold or nurse an infant while
carrying out sedentary tasks such as craft work or preparing
rood.

of the nomadic Arabs. Stools and similar
low sitting supports have cropped up in
Negro Africa, where they are reserved
for chiefs or kings, and in parts of the
Pacific and of Latin America.
No less widely practiced than chair-
sitting is the deep squat. To us it seems
perhaps the height of primitivity, if not
of indecorousness: adults in Western
culture are likely to use the deep squat
only when far from the amenities of
plumbing. It was considered uncouth by
the ancient Greeks, as is suggested by
the fact that satyrs sat in this fashion
when they piped tunes on Pan's pipes.
Yet millions of people in many parts of
Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania
customarily work and rest in this pos-
ture. The deep squat is very similar to
the habitual resting position of the
chimpanzee, and perhaps all of us might
squat throughout our lives if our cultures
did not train us into other postures. It is
a position perfectly easy for young chil-
dren in any culture to assume, but diffi-
cult and uncomfortable for an adult who
has not been accustomed to it.
Ranking slightly behind chair-sitting and the deep squat is the
cross-
legged sitting posture that we call sitting
"Turkish" or "tailor" fashion. This is the
predominant way of sitting among peo-
ples in a great arc from North Africa

through the Middle East to India, south-
east Asia and Indonesia, with outliers in
central Asia, Korea, Japan, Micronesia
and Polynesia. The position with each
foot tucked under the knee of the oppo-
site leg is most common, but there are
eight or 10 distinct variations of the
cross-legged posture, some of which are
practically limited to adepts trained in
these special forms, as in Hindu or Bud-
dhist temples. Cross-legged sitting was
very common among Indians in the New
World: it appears in ancient Mayan
sculptures and mural paintings and in
figurines and pottery of many tribes of
North and South America. And of course
people in modern Western culture sit
cross-legged on occasion-either at work
(e.g., some tailors) or informally at par-
ties and picnics. A sizable minority of
adults in our culture retain sufficiently
flexible joints and tendons to sit in this
manner. But convention and clothing re-
strict the practice. Women are unlikely
to sit cross-legged in mixed company if
they are wearing short or tight-fitting
skirts, but may do so in slacks, shorts or
a full skirt.
Sitting on the floor with the legs
stretched straight ahead or crossed at the
ankles or knees is definitely a feminine
posture, according to our survey. The
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SOURCES OF INFORMATION used by Hewes are here mapped
and rated for reliability. The data cover the postural habits of
some
481 human cultural groups, ancient and modern, as well as pos·
tures used by the gibbon, orangutan, chimpanzee and gorilla.
reasons for its being sex-linked are not
clear. Perhaps the habit was acquired
because the position permits a woman
to nurse a baby and at the same time
carry on other tasks. Sitting in this man-
ner fits in well with working on a belt-
loom, mat-weaving, basketmaking and
other crafts usually carried on by women
in so-called primitive societies. The pos-
ture is particularly common in Melane-
sia and in Indian cultures of western
North America.

Sitting on the heels with the knees
resting on the floor is the formal sitting
position for both men and women in
Japan, and is the regular prayer position
in the Islamic world and many other cul-
tures of Eurasia. In Negro Africa, Mex-
ico and parts of Indonesia this position is
used mainly by women. Sitting with the
legs folded to one side is a widespread
feminine practice, both in "primitive"
and highly developed civilizations:
when chairs or benches are unavailable,
women in our own culture frequently sit
this way. The habit might be supposed
to be dictated by narrow skirts, but it
occurs among many peoples where no
such clothing is worn.
The "cowboy squat," a semikneeling
position with one knee up and the other
down, represents another class of sitting
postures which has an extremely wide
and ancient distribution. Ancient Greek
sculptures show the cowboy squat, often
128
as a shooting position for archery, and
bowmen are depicted in the same posi-
tion in cave paintings of the Middle
Stone Age in Spain. Crapshooters still
work in this position. Versions of the pos-
ture are popular among the Australian
aborigines, North American Indians and
African Negroes. It is primarily a male
position, rarely encountered among fe-

males.
The posture that has received the
most attention from anthropologists,
probably because it strikes us as most
bizarre, is the so-called "N ilotic
stance" -a storklike pose consisting of
standing on one leg with the sole of the
other foot planted against it somewhere
in the knee region. It is a favorite stance
of the tall tribesmen on the Upper Nile
in the southern Sudan, and it crops up
elsewhere in Africa, among hill folk in
India, among the aborigines of Australia
and among Indian tribes in South Amer-
ica. In the Sudan it is a common resting
position for cowherds, who go barefoot
and naked and therefore have no prob-
lem in assuming the posture. If they
wore shoes and had to worry about get-
ting clothing dirty, they would find it
less convenient. The Nilotic stance is
hardly likely to be adopted by a per-
son wearing hobnailed boots or French
heels. But it is a rarity in any case:
there are a great many barefoot and
naked or nearly naked peoples in the
world who apparently would never
dream of standing around on one leg.
p lainly a whole complex of factors-
anatomical, physiological, psycholog-
ical, cultural, environmental, technologi-
cal-is involved in 'the evolution of the

many different postural habits that the
peoples of the earth have assumed.
There are sex-linked factors, such as
clothing, pregnancy, nursing and carry-
ing a baby on the back, which lead to
differences in the sitting positions of
men and women. Clothing and footgear
obviously affect the ways of sitting and
standing, both for men and women. Nu-
trition plays a part, for the amount of
fat in strategic places may determine
whether squatting is comfortable or not.
Styles of house construction have their
influence: houses built on platforms or
with porches, affording opportunities for
dangling the legs over the edge, help de-
velop sitting habits which call for furni-
ture. Terrain and vegetation may deter-
mine sitting or standing habits out-of-
doors. Herdsmen in regions of tall grass
have to stand to watch their stock, while
in a short -grass or tundra area the herder
may sit or squat. Cold, wet or snowy
ground does not invite sitting, but in
dry areas people readily form the habit
of resting directly on the ground. Occu-
pational activities and techniques give
rise to special postures: sitting positions
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r Deliquescent Domains
Western Electric has announced that their relays
will no longer be available for sale to manufacturers.

The problem - obviously - will be to find satis-
factory equivalents.
The Sigma Type72AOZ - t60TS can replace the
WE 255A polar telegraph relay. It is functionally
interchangeable by design and mechanically inter-
changeable by means of an adapter. The "72" has
been exposed to such varied field service that
comparative experience for most applications can
be cited.
130
COMPARISON -WE 2S5A AND SIGMA 72A02. 160T9
255A 72AOZ·160TS
RESISTANCE PER COIL.. OHMS
TURNS PER COIL
INOUCTANCE PER COIL.. HENRY
136::1:: 10%
3200
0.9 '"
,004 CONTACT GAP, NORMAL MINIMUM, INCHES
CURRENT SENSITIVITY. ONE COIL. M .... 0.56,1.5

NORMAL RANGE OF SIGNAL LEVEL, MA. 10.60
MAXIMUM INTELLIGIBLE SPEED. PULSES/SEC.
(700/0 CONTACT EFFICIENCY)
WORDS/MIN. fOUtV,
BIAS DISTORTION ALLOWED, S MA. SIGNAl. 60 CPS
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TOTAL COIL DISSIPATION FOR 400 C. RISE. WATTS 2.2 •
* AS MEASURED IN SIGMA LABORATORY
t60 ;:::1::;10%
2400 1.0
.004
0.6' 1.4 10·60
.00
1350
2%
4%
1.3
As for the WE 280, there is no exact Sigma replacement. We
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and stances are affected by a people's
tools and vehicles-e.g., the loom, the
implements for grinding food, the canoe
or kayak, the longbow, the bicycle, the
racing sulky.
It is conceivable that the handling of
infants may shape their eventual pos-
ture, making some postures easy and
others difficult. If tight swaddling or
cradling, or being carried on the moth-
er's back or hip for two or three years,
can affect motor habits to anything like
the extent that some investigators claim
it affects the development of personality,
significant cultural differences in posture
should be traceable to these practices.
probably the most interesting aspect of
the whole subject is the question of
cultural attitudes toward posture. Pos-
tural etiquette varies from culture to cul-
ture, and from one period to another.
Religious taboos or concepts of decorum
ban certain postures in a given culture.
Some societies go to great lengths to en-
sure propriety in the manner of sitting,
kneeling, bowing or standing on all pub-

lic occasions, maintaining careful dis-
tinctions on the basis of sex, .age and
social status.
Western culture has undergone a re-
laxation of its postural code in the last
several generations, and this change is
reflected in the deSigns of furniture and
clothing. The chairs of the 16th and 17th
centuries, with vertical backs and hard
seats, were remarkably uncomfortable
by modern standards. The 18th century
saw the introduction of curved chairs
and couches, with soft upholstery. Along
with this came much greater latitude for
informal sitting postures-though cos-
tume styles, especially for women, pre-
vented much genuine relaxation. In the
19th century Europe and America re-
turned to fairly rigid postural standards,
and it was not until about the period of
the First World War that the avant-
garde began taking to the floor at par-
ties and the studio couch began to
replace the settee. Certain segments of
our culture, of course, preserve severe
postural codes: for example, formal mili-
tary drill, ceremonialized duties and
some forms of religious worship. Correct
"form" is also indispensable in calis-
thenics, classical ballet, fencing, golf and
so on.
We train our children to conform to
cultural norms of posture by verbal in-
struction, by actual phYSical positioning

of the body in the "proper" posture for
specific occasions and by ridiculing or
otherwise punishing deviations. We may
go so far as to denounce deviations as
disrespectful, immoral or as evidence of
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drunkenness or mental abnormality. Our
language has terms that carry overtones
of disapproval for postural noncom form-
ity: e.g., "sprawling," "slumping,"
"lounging," "cringing."
I t seems quite clear that a better knowl-edge and understanding
of postural
habits could benefit us in many ways. At
present nearly all our complex tools, in-
strument panels, control boards, benches,
lathes, etc., have been planned for the
use of people accustomed to the postural
traditions of Western cultures. Human
engineers might profitably consider a
wider range of postures in planning for
working or resting space requirements,
not only because some of our traditional
postures may be less efficient than those
employed by Asians or Africans, but also
because it might be easier to train our
people to use a wider range of postures
than to keep on trying to fit furniture de-
signed for drawing rooms, throne rooms
or banquet halls into crowded quarters.
Some work has been done to adjust the
human body to travel in very fast-mov-
ing aircraft(i.e., the prone position has

been found best). But we ought to go
much further and explore the possible
usefulness to us of the various cross-
legged, squatting, kneeling and other
postures which so many millions of peo-
ple outside the orbit of Western civiliza-
tion have found convenient for their
daily work.
At a more basic level, the study of
postural behavior could tell us much
about functional relationships between
postures and environment, about rela-
tionships between different cultures and
about human history. One of the ques-
tions on which it might throw light is
the biological evolution of man from our
primate ancestors. The role of postural
and motor-habit patterns in the processes
of adaptation and selection which
brought about changes in the shape of
the pelvis, in limb proportions and in
foot structure is one of the most impor-
tant themes in our attempt to understand
the emergence of man. It has been ably
discussed by a number of anatomists,
paleontologists and physical anthropolo-
gists, but so far not within the context
of a coordinated program of postural re-
search on all levels.
The well-known cultural anthropolo-
gist A. L. Kroeber once remarked that
posture "is one of the most interesting
matters in the whole range of customs."
Even those who may not agree with this

view must at least grant that we ought
to learn a great deal more about human
postural habits than we know at the
present time.
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neutra_survival_through_design,_chapter_20.pdf

juanheredia
Sticky Note
juanheredia
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I guess all can be condensed here.

juanheredia
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type defined
juanheredia
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quatremere
juanheredia
Sticky Note
juanheredia
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typology as analtical moment of architecture
juanheredia

Sticky Note
Dilaectic
juanheredia
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type essence of architecture
juanheredia
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One of the most interesting paragraphs
juanheredia
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determinism
juanheredia
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Monuments are primary elements
juanheredia
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catalysts
juanheredia
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Nimes, Arles
juanheredia
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Types/Forms originating in Rome
juanheredia
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juanheredia
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Idler qua flaneaur

juanheredia
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Context as illusion (is he talking about ambiente?)
juanheredia
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Not Dresden though
juanheredia
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juanheredia
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Analogous city

gasset_man_and_people.pdf
The Fiction of Function
Author(s): Stanford Anderson
Source: Assemblage, No. 2 (Feb., 1987), pp. 18-31
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171086 .
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ress
Stanford Anderson
The Fiction of Function
To the memory of Roy Lamson
Stanford Anderson is Director of the
Ph.D. Program for History, Theory, and
Criticism of Architecture at the Massa-
chusetts Institute of Technology.
The polemics of postmodernism insist on the centrality
and the na'vet6 of the concept of function within modern
architecture. It is the error and the fruitlessness of this
postmodern position that I wish to reveal. My title, "The
Fiction of Function," may suggest one simple and negative
assessment of the role of function in the making of archi-
tecture. On the contrary, I wish to unpack several possible
and related references that may be drawn from this title -
references that have served architecture well, and not only

in modern times.
Perhaps I should acknowledge immediately that I was
driven to my topic by the thesis of an exhibition and book
by Heinrich Klotz, both titled Modern and Post-Modern.'
Klotz's slogan is "Fiction, not function." The slogan is an
effective evocation of his thesis: that the distinction be-
tween modern and postmodern may be found in the shift
of focus from function to fiction. With Klotz, this is also a
normative distinction, justifying the support of postmodern
architecture as against any form of continuity with the
modern. Labeling modern architecture as functionalist for
polemical purposes is not new, and one may wonder
whether the issue needs to be joined again. However, the
exaggerated association of modernism with functionalism is
recurrent, and now Klotz's catalogue has received the
award of the International Committee of Architectural
Critics.2
My argument will be that "functionalism" is a weak con-
cept, inadequate for the characterization or analysis of any
architecture. In its recurrent use as the purportedly defin-
1 (frontispiece). Ernst May,
Frankfurter KOche, model

kitchen for the low-income
housing estates designed by
May in Frankfurt, 1925-30.
19
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assemblage 2
ing principle of modern architecture, functionalism has
dulled our understanding of both the theories and practice
of modern architecture. Further, if one then wishes, as
many now propose, to reject modern architecture, this is
done without adequate knowledge of what is rejected or
what that rejection entails. Thus I wish first to argue that,

within modern architecture, functionalism is a fiction -
fiction in the sense of error. Later, I wish to incorporate
function within a richer notion of fiction - that of story-
telling.
The Fiction of Function in the Modern
Movement as Viewed from 1932
To undermine the notion of functionalism within modern
architecture, we may return to a topic that is now, per-
haps, all too familiar: the exhibition and book titled The
International Style, organized by Henry-Russell Hitchcock
and Philip Johnson for the Museum of Modern Art in
New York City in 1932.3 No doubt it is possible to exag-
gerate the importance of the International Style exhibition,
yet its inordinate influence on the understanding of mod-
ern architecture must be admitted. "The International
Style," a term coined for the exhibition to label a group of
exceptional and inventive works of the 1920s, imposed it-
self to the extent that we now find it difficult to refer to
modernist works of that period by any other name. More
insidiously, the limited group of buildings exhibited in
New York and the meager concepts of the International
Style exhibition continue to put severe limits on what we
know of the twenties - not to mention the contraints on
extending the corpus of modern architecture to the thirties.

At the heart of the polemic of Hitchcock and Johnson was
an exercise in connoisseurship. The authors sought to de-
fine the visual traits that assured the commonality of true
modern architecture and thus established a style - the
first proper style since neoclassicism. Modern architecture
was not only given its place within the millenial history of
art, but given a place of honor. All this was apparently
accomplished despite the remarkably inadequate stylistic
criteria offered: volume rather than mass; regularity rather
than symmetry; and the avoidance of ornament.
An important corollary of Hitchcock and Johnson's empha-
sis on the primacy of style was their rejection of "function-
alism." Thus within the progressive architecture of the
preceding decade, they distinguished works of architecture
that were functionalist and those that were not. Now it is
true that there were those architects of the 1920s and
1930s who were prepared to fly a functionalist banner and
to resist discussions of form, let alone "style." For Hitch-
cock and Johnson, the archdemon of functionalism was
Hannes Meyer, who, for example, in his time at the Bau-
haus, constructed diagrams of circulation and sunlight that
claimed to show the "factors determining a plan." Far from
functionalism being the crux of modern architecture, it

was precisely the avoidance of functionalism, as recognized
by Hitchcock and Johnson, that allowed inclusion under
the mantle of the International Style. The seminal figures
within the style were said to be, of course, Ludwig Mies
van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, J. J. P. Oud, and Le Cor-
busier.
Hitchcock and Johnson's insistence on style, then, might
have drawn a line of demarcation between certain parties
in modern architecture, as between the apparent function-
alism of Meyer and the sophistication of Mies's Tugendhat
house of 1930. But this line is not the one that marks
inclusion or exclusion from the International Style exhibi-
tion. If we take the authors' polemic against functionalism
as the crux of their work, we would have to recognize that
some of those architects who were included would not
have been uncomfortable with serious discussions of func-
tion. Consider Gropius's studies of the density of Zeilenbau
housing according to a criterion of sun angle or his Sie-
mensstadt housing, which is organized as relentlessly as
any housing by a so-called functionalist. On the other
hand, if we take as central the authors' visual criteria for
the "International Style," we would be hard-pressed to un-
derstand their exclusion of the League of Nations competi-
tion entry by the archfunctionalist Hannes Meyer (which

easily meets all the International Style criteria) while ac-
cepting Mies's Barcelona Pavilion (which, if not concerned
with mass, is also not concerned with volume). Further-
more, we must recognize that some of the heroes of Hitch-
cock and Johnson were never comfortable with the "style"
20
Anderson
enterprise, certainly not the meager formal enterprise pro-
posed in the International Style.
More important than these first points about the demarca-
tion attempted by Hitchcock and Johnson is the distortion
their position introduced into any analysis of the thought
and work of the progressive architects of that period. It
may be useful to recognize "functionalism" to the extent
that one can find some naive functionalist arguments to
contrast with Hitchcock and Johnson's antifunctionalist
rhetoric. However, any serious examination of the build-

ings at issue will reveal that none of them, whatever the
surrounding rhetoric, can be explained functionally. It was
a fiction that function provided a crucial line of demarca-
tion within modern architecture.
The Postwar Fiction of Function in the Modern
Movement
In an address to the Royal Institute of British Architects in
1957, the justly renowned architectural historian John
Summerson argued that functionalism, in the sense of
faithfulness to program, provided the unifying principle for
modern architecture.4 With Summerson, function became
not only a common, but also a positive, trait of modern
architecture (though there is a sense that Summerson ac-
cepted this fact rather fatalistically). The modern architects
who responded to Summerson accepted his claims, at best,
with some diffidence. Summerson himself soon disavowed
his hypothesis, but the equation of modernism with func-
tionalism continues to recur. The advocates of so-called
Post-Modernism adopt the still more untenable position
that it is a functionalist line of demarcation that separates
all of modernism from successor positions. They brand the

whole of modernism as functionalism; the naivete and/or
inadequacy of functionalism is cogently argued; the ra-
tional rejection of functionalism then implies the rejection
of modernism. Q.E.D.
But if it was a fiction to treat functionalism as a crucial
feature of even part of modernism, it is a grosser fiction to
treat the whole of modernism as functionalist. This fiction
is used to define modernism narrowly and in indefensible
2. Hannes Meyer, Peterschule,
Basel, 1927
21
assemblage 2
terms, and thus to denigrate modernism. Since "Post-
Modernism" is typically defined not on its own principles
but in opposition to modernism, the narrowest and most
inadequate characterization of modernism offers both the
easiest victory over modernism and the widest possible field
for postmodernism.

The Inherent Fiction of Function in
Architecture
No description of function, however thorough, is exhaus-
tive of the functional characteristics of even relatively
simple activities. The inadequacy of Hannes Meyer's few
factors for determining a plan cannot be solved by adding
more factors. No description of function, however thor-
ough, will automatically translate into architectural form.
The more thorough the description of function, the less
likely that the description will hold true even for the dura-
tion of the design process. It would be difficult if not
impossible to find an artifact, simple or complex, that has
not functioned in unanticipated ways.
From arguments such as these, let us assume that func-
tionalism is an untenable position. If so, then it is reason-
able for the postmodernist not to be a functionalist.
However, for the same reason, I argue that few modernists
even had functionalist intentions. Nonetheless, even if
functionalism offers an unreasonable analysis of architec-
ture, it does not follow that all concern with function is
wrong or that a globally antifunctionalist position is
correct.

Stories About Function
If functionalism is inherently a fiction, then any claims for
functionalism in the modern movement must be a fiction.
This is true, but in more than one sense. It is a fiction in
the senses to which I have already alluded: a) not even
self-proclaimed functionalists could in fact fulfill their pro-
gram without recourse to other form generators; and b) not
all modernists, indeed rather few modernists, ever endorsed
functionalism. However, a concern with function could
also be a fiction under a more positive connotation of that
word, with the sense of storytelling rather than falsehood.
Architecture is, among other things, a bearer of meaning
- as the postmodernists will tell us. Yet this was no less so
in modernism than in other periods. Furthermore, it is
surely not unique to modern architecture that part of the
story it tells is about function. It may be sustainable, how-
ever, that modern architecture, more than that of any
other time, emphasized stories about function.
Fragments of such stories can be carried even in rather
obvious details: direct evidence of the functional features of
a building, as in the differentiation of windows at stairs or

large spaces; or building elements designed to reveal the
function of the building, as when large windows display
printing presses or other mechanical installations.
Certain features of buildings may reveal internal functions
sufficiently directly to be seen as more than metaphors for
those functions: the length and repetitiveness of a factory
elevation refers to similar characteristics of the processes it
houses.
Structural details may reveal their own function, but may
also serve metaphorically: the great pin-joints of the arches
of Peter Behrens's Turbine Factory in Berlin, beautifully
machined and displayed on pedestals just above street
level, insist on their own objectness while suggesting them-
selves as the engines of their own structural system and
cognate to those engines of another mechanical system
fabricated within.
For that matter, it is virtually impossible to deprive build-
ing elements of metaphoric qualities associated with
various functions: portals and doors loaded with the signifi-
cance of arrival or departure; windows as the eyes of the
building or as the frame through which a controlled view
of the world is afforded.

All these examples, though, when taken in isolation or in
accidental groupings, are little more than anecdotal. Only
when a builder or architect has a larger vision of his or her
work do these individual, sometimes unavoidably meta-
phorical details, attain a higher level of organization that
we might call a fiction, a story. That story may be about
function, and not only the literal function of the work.
Perhaps no work has been considered such a pure demon-
22
Anderson
3. Mart Stam, project for a
stock exchange building,
K6nigsberg
4. J. A. Brinkman and L. C.
Van der Vlugt, Van Nelle
Factory, Rotterdam, 1926-30

5. Brinkman and Van der
Vlugt, Van Nelle Factory,
workers' cafeteria
23
assemblage 2
6. Ernst May and others,
Bruchfeldstrasse, Frankfurt
1926-27
7. Peter Behrens, AEG Turbine
Factory, Berlin, 1908-9
stration of the functionalist thesis as the kitchens designed
for the social housing of Frankfurt under the direction of
Ernst May in the late twenties. The Frankfurter Kiiche,
such as the one for the R6merstadt estate, is evidently con-
cerned with economy in size and in organization; yet such
an observation just as evidently only touches the surface.
The kitchen must also be seen in its political and social
context. For all its economy, this kitchen offers more than

had been available to some of the residents and is part of a
program to assure an adequate environment to all within a
state of limited resources. Furthermore, its economy is to
be assessed not only in terms of steps within the kitchen,
but also in a reassessment of the role of the kitchen within
the household and within the community. One may or
may not endorse the life that is envisioned here, but envi-
sioned it is, and also realized with eloquence and not a
little beauty.
What might be considered the functionalism of the work-
shop elevations of Gropius's Bauhaus in Dessau is much
more deeply tied to the modernist metaphysics of demate-
rialization espoused by Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy in his con-
structions and teaching.
Ozenfant and Le Corbusier conceived the Esprit Nouveau,
an interpretation of the quality of life that was coming
about through, or was potential in, the conditions of mod-
ern times. The same vision informs Le Corbusier's still
lifes, the spatial and formal ingenuity of the Villa Savoye,
or yet again the select perception of the kitchen of that
same villa. Le Corbusier offered a vision of certain eternal
goods: the loaf of bread, the can of milk, the bottle of
wine, light and air, access to the earth and the sky, physi-

cal health, all made available more fully and to greater
numbers thanks to new potentials that were both spiritual
and technical. There is hardly a detail of the Villa Savoye
that does not contribute to this story. The pavillon de l'Es-
prit Nouveau and the immeubles villas tell the same story
more economically, seeking to make the same goods more
generally available.
Making a World
To the extent that the Villa Savoye tells us of a vision that
Le Corbusier once had, it is indeed a story. Thus we en-
24
Anderson
8. Behrens, AEG Turbine
Factory, detail
25

assemblage 2
9. LAszl6 Moholy-Nagy, ZYIII,
1924
10. Walter Gropius, the Bau-
haus, Dessau,1925-26. Bauhaus
photograph by Itting.
11. Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), Still Life, 1920,
hung in Le Corbusier's Jeanneret House, Paris, 1923
12. Ernst May, house of Ernst
May, Frankfurt, 1925
26
Anderson
13. Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye,
Poissy, 1928-31

14. Le Corbusier, kitchen of the Villa Savoye
27
assemblage 2
15. Johannes Duiker, Open Air
School, Amsterdam, 1929-30
28
Anderson
gage the iconographic dimension of architecture. To the
extent that the Villa Savoye permits that we live according
to that vision, it does something more. It "makes a world"
that does not determine, but does allow us to live and
think differently than if it did not exist. If this fiction can
only exist, precariously, in the Villa Savoye, it may indeed
be "merely" a fiction, as valuable to us as other great sto-
ries. If its vision or principles can be generalized, we may

have a literal grasp on a world that could not have been
ours without the originating fiction.
We have moved far from the limited notions of function
with which we began. Yet to provide the enabling physical
conditions for a way of life is to address function at its
highest level; and the more limited details or references
may remain integral to such a larger ambition. There is
not only one way in which these larger ambitions may be
pursued. Each time that Louis Kahn sought to reconceive
an institution and give it the physical surrounds that would
allow it to reach its full potential, he "made a world" in
that place for that group of people, but also instructed us
both in principles and in specific performances.
Alvar Aalto did much the same but with important differ-
ences in the "world" he envisioned. It is a world in which
the various institutions are less different from one another,
share more with one another. There is less institutional
control. There is more of the complexity and conflation of
the natural and the man-made, of the new and the old.
An important and too little explored aspect of Aalto is his
continuing concern to find a reciprocity between "his
world" and the world. "His world" was held back from uto-
pian idealism and was informed by the conditions of the

world around him. Both a reason for, and a fruit of, that
restraint was Aalto's refusal to renounce the ambition to
make the world better, and not only for the privileged.
Throughout Finland's long wartime and beyond, Aalto was
concerned with the improvement of conventional housing
under severe constraints. Compared with l'Esprit Nouveau,
or even with Aalto's more famous works, this was a modest
story, but the making of a world that goes beyond the lit-
eral task nonetheless. Exactly how, and to what degree,
these more modest works by Aalto go beyond the conven-
tional raises important isues not unlike those that Adolf
Loos explored at the beginning of the century in Vienna.
Loos, Le Corbusier, Kahn, Aalto: about each of these
architects one can make several claims. In the specificity
of architectural making, they made places that "make a
world" for those who inhabit them. As different and, no
doubt, as mutually untenable as those "worlds" may be,
none of their "worlds" is a matter of mere design whims
that provide passing comfort or titillation for consumers of
architecture. Their buildings tell stories, but not just any
story that is different or amusing or ironic or calculated to
sell. Rightly or wrongly, not somberly, but rather with
ample recognition of the potentials and joys both of life

and of architecture, they challenged themselves to find
how architecture could serve the people of their cultures in
their times. To do what they did involved not function or
fiction, but both and more. Their work required an inte-
gral understanding of architecture and the life it supports
and addresses.
I would assert that architects such as Loos, Le Corbusier,
Aalto, and Kahn sought to "put modernism in its place,"
or perhaps better, to give modernism its place. Loos spoke
of "creating buildings in which a modern way of living
could naturally develop."'5 I like that formulation, for it
opens a space between the place provided and the life
lived. Thus it breaks any sense of determinism from archi-
tecture to modern life or vice versa. In his buildings, Le
Corbusier, relative to Loos, projected a more radical
change both in architecture and in modern life - still, I
believe, without determinism. His machine a habiter is a
provocative play on a recurrent French construction: the
"machine to live in" poses new conditions but no more
determines how life will be lived than the machine a "crire
determines what will be written.6
In their works, the architects just evoked sought to make
places that support modern fictions. Similarly, we can as-

sume a position for the historian or critic: the necessity of
providing an adequate story about modern architecture if
we are to criticize it and grow from it.
It would hardly appear necessary to make such a seemingly
unexceptionable claim, but apparently it is. When a rea-
29
assemblage 2
16. Duiker, Open Air School
30
Anderson
soned dismissal of functionalism can be used to dismiss
modern architecture and to avoid a more integral under-
standing of architecture including function; when the icon-
ographic capacity of architecture can be isolated as the

dominant feature of architecture and all concern with what
is communicated is neglected; when architecture becomes
communication rather than place, place tied to communal
responsibilities and potentials, then we need a return to a
more critical discourse. Only works that are strong enough
to challenge us facilitate such a discourse.
Notes
I thank Malcolm Quantrill and
Texas A&M University for the
opportunity to present this paper
within the 1985 Rowlett Lectures.
The present paper is only slightly
revised from that which appeared in
the pamphlet edited by Quantrill,
Putting Modernism in Place: Row-
lett Report 85 (College Station,
Texas: Texas A&M University,
1985), pp. 27-32.
Shortly after the Texas lecture, I
enjoyed the opportunity of explor-
ing this material at greater length in
a seminar sponsored by the St. Bo-

tolph Foundation at the St. Botolph
Club in Boston. That seminar was
organized by the late, wise and be-
loved Roy Lamson, then Professor
Emeritus of Literature at the Mas-
sachusetts Institute of Technology.
Subsequent to the initial draft of
this lecture, Peter Eisenman pub-
lished an essay, "The End of the
Classical: the End of the Beginning,
the End of the End" (Perspecta 21
[1985]: 155-72), in which he argues
that "architecture from the fifteenth
century to the present has been un-
der the influence of three 'fictions.'
S.
. representation, reason,
and his-
tory." Eisenman's more ambitious
argument and the one advanced

here have only tangential relations.
1. Heinrich Klotz, Moderne und
Postmoderne: Architektur der Ge-
genwart, 1960-1980 (Braunschweig:
Vieweg & Sohn, 1984).
2. Klotz's 1985 CICA Award is for
"the best architectural exhibition
catalog. "
3. Henry-Russell Hitchcock and
Philip Johnson, The International
Style: Architecture since 1922
(Princeton: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1932).
4. John Summerson, "The Case for
a Theory of Modern Architecture,"
Journal of the Royal Institute of
British Architects, ser. 3, 64 (June
1957): 307-14.

5. Adolf Loos, as referenced by
Heinrich Kulka, "Adolf Loos,
1870-1933," Architects Yearbook 9
(1960): 13.
6. Le Corbusier's defense of archi-
tecture contra functionalism is fa-
miliar from his 1929 response to
the Czech critic, Karel Teige. Le
Corbusier confronts the worth of
the functionalists while, through
their works, recognizing them as
fellow poets. The Teige-Le Corbu-
sier exchange is available in English
in Oppositions 4 (October 1974):
79-108.
Figure Credits
1. J. Buekshmitt, Ernst May
(Stuttgart: A. Koch, 1963), p. 47.
2. Das Neue Frankfurt 2 (1928).
3, 4, 5. Giovanni Fanelli, Archi-

tettura moderna in Olanda (Flor-
ence: Marchi and Bertolli, 1968).
7. Karl Bernhard, Zeitschrift des
Vereines deutscher Ingenieure 55,
no. 39 (30 September 1911).
8, 15, 16. Photograph by Stanford
Anderson.
9. H. Weitemeir, et al., Ldszl6
Moholy-Nagy (Stuttgart: G. Hatje,
1974), p. 50.
10. L. Moholy-Nagy, Von Material
zu Architektur (1929; Mainz-Berlin:
F. Kupferberg, 1968), p. 234.
11. M. Besset, Who Was Le Cor-
busier (Geneva: Skira, 1968), p. 66.
12. M. I. T., Rotch Visual Collec-
tions, lantern slide 36306.
13. Le Corbusier, Creation is a Pa-

tient Search (New York: Praeger,
1960), p. 92.
14. W. Boesiger, ed., Le Corbusier
and Pierre Jeanneret: The Complete
Architectural Works, 1929-1934,
vol. 2 (Ziirich: Les Editions d'Ar-
chitecture, 1935), p. 29.
31
Article Contentsp. 19p. [18]p. 20p. 21p. 22p. 23p. 24p. 25p.
26p. 27p. 28p. 29p. 30p. 31Issue Table of ContentsAssemblage,
No. 2 (Feb., 1987), pp. 1-136Front Matter [pp. 1-3]. . . With
One Wing [p. 5]On Hegel's Definition of Architecture [pp. 6-
17]The Fiction of Function [pp. 18-31]Mies van der Rohe's New
National Gallery and the Problem of Context [pp. 32-
43]Proclamation of the Creators of Culture, 1934 [pp. 44-
45]Unity of the Discontinuous: Alvaro Siza's Berlin Works [pp.
46-61]Three Projects [pp. 62-95]Pozzo, Blondel, and the
Structure of the Supplement [pp. 96-109]The Invention of the
Skyscraper: Notes on Its Diverse Histories [pp. 110-117]Adrian
Stokes and Critical Vision [pp. 118-133]Back Matter [pp. 134-
136]

PAUL LEWIS, MARC TSURUMAKI, DAVID J. LEWIS
Princeton Architectural Press, New York
; sections.
mt section
~sign for the
:ing. The
hes stack
lion of the
within
~s so seam-
• requires

,ight rotating
ough an
rms on
:,use and
e spiral
,y the land-
between
:raHaus,
>gether, and
n. Arguably
irged sec-
I simple
·faces and

e project's
1ized
~s to section.
(uma &
)asic strat-
by alterna-
,g changing
la depart-
1 Kuma's
umes within
top of one
1 the site
1mbinations

1 of discrete
:mcert halls1
I auditori-
circulation
~asa da
1ildings,
ton School
Siza's lbere
· Square,
+ Renfro's
Universita
s of archi-
es.

)aches
;ource of
study and investigation. While the works used to exemplify one
type of section were selected ~ecause of their ability to clarify
and distill a given approach, they do not always illustrate the
spatial play of the hybrid combinations. The interplay of two or
mare approaches to section gives architects the capacity to
not only accommodate complex programs but develop projects
that are multilayered. This does not mean, though, that all
projects that use more than one type of section are necessarily
interesting or compelling works of architecture. Rather, the
exploration of the variety and complexity of hybrid approaches
demonstrates the expansive range of possibilities of the

heuristic
structure of section types. The classification system is used
not to constrain but to catalyze architectural discourse.
Given its extensive use in architectural practice today, the
section
arrives surprisingly late in the history of architectural drawing.
ln fact, while individual instances of sectional drawing were in
evidence by the early part of the fifteenth century, section as
a codified drawing type did not complete the triumvirate of
plan,
section, and elevation in European architectural academies and
competitions until the !ate seventeenth or early eighteenth cen-
tury.12 While it is beyond the scope of this essay to map a
compre-

hensive history of the architectural section over the course of
the last several hundred years in the West, it's instructive to
frame
the major changes in the conceptualization and deployment of
section in order to contextualize its current status and potential.
What follows is a series of episodes that coalesce around
several key ideas. Discontinuous and incomplete, these
moments
reveal the potentials and paradoxes of the section. Primary
among
these contradictions is the dual nature of the term section itself.
When we speak about section we mean both a representational
technique and a series of architectural practices pertaining to
the
vertical organization of buildings and related architectural and

urbanistic constructions. These conditions are interrelated both
historically and professionally. Although the two meanings of
the
term are often used interchangeably and fluidly, we will attempt
to
clarify this relationship in order to examine the historical
trajec-
tory of the section, from its origins as a representational mode
to
its development as a set of design practices with spatial,
tectonic,
and performative implications.
THE ANALYTICAL CUT: ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANATOMY
The origin of section as a representational mechanism, while
obscure, has typically been associated with its capacity to
reveal
.the hidden workings of an existing building or body~often as

a retrospective or analytical technique. The earliest surviving
.,p.,•
Charles Correa, Kanchanjunga Apartments, 1983
Steven Holl Architects, American Library Berlin, 1989
Mecanoo Architecten, Technical University Delft library, 1997
Neutelings Riedijk Architects, Museum aan
de Stroom, 2010 15
Villard de Honnecourt, Reims Cathedral, ca. 1230
Donato Bramante, Roman ruins, ca. 1500
Giuliano da Sangallo, Temples of Portumnus and Vesta, 1465
Leonardo da Vinci, study for central plan church, ca. 1507
26

drawings that tentatively depict conditions of an architectural
section are Villard de Honnecourt's parchment studies of
medieval
cathedrals from the thirteenth century. 13 Among the sixty-three
pages of ~is known drawings, which range broadly in subject
mat-
ter, are hints of a cut through the exterior wall of Reims
Cathedral,
shown to the side of a drawing primarily intended to illustrate
the
sequence of flying buttresses shown in elevation. Indeed, while
Honnecourt's drawing is orthogonal and made through clean
lines,
the section as a cut is tentative and incomplete, acting as a side
note to the depiction of structural complexities that merge with

the
qualities of the architecture in the Gothic cathedral.
Nevertheless,
this early example presages one of the predominant uses of the
sectional drawing-as a means to analyze and represent structural
and constructional relationships visible only through the
delinea-
tion of a building's vertical organization.
While Honnecourt's drawing suggests that section was not
wholly unknown in architectural circles prior to the
Renaissance,
its rise as a codified form of representation has been linked to
two related precursors that originate from outside architecture
proper: the observation of archaeological ruins and the
biological

description of the human body.14 In both instances, section is
explicitly associated with the visual and physical dissection of
an
extant body, whether constructed or organic. As such, section
originates as the drawn record of an observed material condition
first and as a representational mechanism on!y in retrospect.
Jacques Guillerme and HEllElne VElrln's article "The
Archaeology
of Section" traces the origin of the architectural drawing to the
observation and subsequent depiction of Roman ruins and to
the physical breaks and discontinuities in decaying structures.
15
These fragmented monuments provided a view that
simultaneously

exposed interior and exterior to the eye of the touring architect
or artist. According to Guillerme and verin, the practice of
record-
ing through drawing these surviving monuments in their state
of romantic decay gave slow birth to the section as a conscious
projection of architectural intentionality, "transforming the
obser-
vation of archaeological remains into the observance of archi-
tectural diagrams." The section understood as an imaginary cut
through an otherwise solid building or as a means of describing
a future construction comes only after the documentation of
ruins that reveal what would otherwise be hidden. This
translation
necessitated a conceptual shift from a literal depiction of a

fragmented building to an abstract device, the imaginary plane
of the sectional cut. The conventional nature of this
transformation
is recorded in the variety of techniques used to make explicit
the
operations of the cut, ranging from the device of rendering new
or projected buildings in quasiruined form to the emergence of
poche as a method for depicting the conceptually solid
structural
fabric of a building.
A parallel set of antecedents can be found in artistic and
scientific practices depicting the body and its internal organs
that
evolved from the physical dissection of human remains and
from investigative anatomy as it emerged in the fifteenth

century.
As with the architectural section, these drawings often relied
~ctural
of medieval
:ty-three
1bject mat-
; Cathedral,
Jstrate the
?d, while
clean lines,
as a side
,rge with the

Nertheless,
:'!s of the
1t structural
, delinea-
,as not
aissance,
1ked to
tecture
biological
:tion is
tion of an
;ection

:::ondition
;pect.
trchaeology
g to the
rnd to
ctures. 15
ultaneously
·chitect
of record-
. state
nscious
:he obser-
archi-

nary cut
scribing
rn of
:ranslation
,fa
y plane
1sformation
plicit the
ng new
mce of
:;tructural
and

rgans that
ind
1 century.
elied
upon ari inventive array of visual devices to render explicit the
sectional nature of the cuts. The most often cited are Leonardo
da Vinci's obsessive studies of the human form, including his
drawing of a human skull, which combines aspects of plan,
eleva-
tion, and section in a cutaway perspective. Leonardo's depiction
of a cranium was not unlike that of the dome in his contem-
poraneous study for a circular library, both demonstrating the
act of cutting as essential to simultaneously show exterior and

interior conditions of the body or building.
In perhaps the most famous of these early medical examples,
Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), the
vari-
ously skinned and flayed bodies are depicted in poses that
mimic
those of living and allegorical subjects. These woodcut illustra-
tions are intricately constructed, not only to display the internal
structure of muscles and viscera but also to acknowledge the
act of cutting as both a physical operation and a
representational
conceit. Figures adopt stances that help to demonstrate the
anatomical systems on view-but also fancifully seem to partici-
pate in their own dissection and display.

While it may be difficult to verify any causal relation
between these biological depictions and architectural practice,
it is nonetheless possible to identify productive similarities
whereby techniques applied in one sphere reappeared in the
other, suggesting a cross-fertilization of graphic techniques
and modes of representation. More important, however, drawing
techniques derived from both archaeological and anatomical
practices strongly indicate that section originated as a
retrospec-
tive rather than prospective tool, an analytical device rather
than a generative instrument. It is perhaps this origin in the
recording and revealing of extant conditions that has accounted
for the slow integration of section as a productive instrumen-

tality in architectural practice .
THE EMERGENCE OF THE ARCHITECTURAL SECTION:
MEASURE AND PERCEPTION
Sectional drawing as an explicitly architectural technique
appears
in the work of Italian architects in the latter half of the fifteenth
century. At this time a renewed interest in documenting the
sectional ruins of classical antiquity intersected with the use of
section for speculating on the structural and material properties
of ancient buildings that had not deteriorated, as well as for
describing new constructions and projects. The Pantheon, built
by Emperor Hadrian in AD 128, was a frequent subject of
inspired
conjecture, with speculative section drawings executed in the

hope of ascertaining the structural and proportional logic that
had
kept it intact.1' It offered to architects a powerful subject for
the
use of section, given the seductive cut in the illuminating
central
oculus of the dome. Instead of a sealed dome, the Pantheon
displayed a provocative void, allowing interior and exterior
space
to merge in a manner that would typically be seen only through
a section drawing.
Early collections of Renaissance drawings (such as the Codex
Coner, the Codex Barberini, and the sketches of Baldassarre
Leonardo da Vinci, Sku1!, 1489
Andreas Vesalius, drawings, from De Humani Coiporis

Fabrica, 1543
Bernardo della Volpaia, Pantheon, from Codex Coner,
ca. 1515
27
Bernardo de!la Volpaia, Tempietto, from Codex Coner,
ca. 1515
Giuliano da Sangallo, centralized building, from Codex
Barberini, ca. 1500
Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, St. Peter's, ca. 1520
28
Peruzzi) contain numerous sections, including different
interpre-
tations of the Pantheon as well as views of contemporaneous
centralized churches. These drawings seek, through an

imaginary
cut, to trace the exterior and interior profile of the wall, thus
visualizing the relationship between the building's form and the
space it contained. Even in these early drawings the status of
the
section as a form of architectural representation was in
question,
as the mapping of the substance of the wall was only a part of
the image. As Wolfgang Lotz noted in his essay "The Rendering
of the Interior in Architectural Drawings of the Renaissance,"
section drawings developed not as a singular and fully codified
practice but as a series of incipient operations that overlap and
combine in promiscuous ways.17 For Lotz, the question was
less

the status of the section cut itself than the role this drawing type
was to play in either staging interior scenes or recording archi-
tectural measure and proportion. In the Codex Coner (a drawing
set now attributed to Bernardo della Volpaia and dated to the
early
1500s) the view within the sectioned walls is depicted through
a single-point perspective. This painterly approach sacrifices
dimensional accuracy for the illusion of a scene visible beyond
the cut plane of the section. In crintrast, certain sections in the
Codex Barberini (attributed to Giuliano da Sangallo) and in the
Pantheon drawing by Peruzzi demonstrate a commitment to
ortho-
graphic projection, where the space beyond the cut is shown in
elevation with no vanishing point or perspectival distortion.

While explicitly spatial, the sectional perspectives of the
Codex Coner represent a highly particular notion of space, both
adapted to and in part determined by the logic of the drawing
type itself. The architectural historian and critic Robin Evans
has
argued that the inherent logic of the section drawing is heavily
biased toward bilaterally symmetrical and axial spatial organi-
zations, which are readily depicted through this technique. 18
Moreover, the centralized and frontal sections of the Codex
Coner
imply an understanding of space that is conceived
volumetrically
but also from the perspective of a static observer taking in the
architecture as a pictorial composition. In this reading the per-

spectiva! section reinforces a notion of architecture as a
principally
optical phenomenon, and one tethered to a fixed viewpoint.
By contrast, in later drawings of the Codex Barberini arid the
work of Peruzzi and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, the
observer
is progressively removed as a subject through the use of more
orthogonal representational conventions in the depiction of sec-
tion. These drawings abandon the optical distortions of perspec-
tive, resulting in a technique that can eliminate the subjective in
favor of objective accuracy. This can be understood as a
necessary
development of the section drawing as a professional document,
capable of conveying in unambiguous terms the dimensional and

geometric information required by the builder. It is significant
that this transition coincided with Sangallo's and Peruzzi's
partic-
ipation in the fabricca of St. Peter's under Raphael and the
emer-
gence of new hierarchies of building production that separated
the architect from building. In Lotz's view this shift also leads
to
the possibility of more complex, dynamically conceived spaces,
r
I
I
I
I
I

I
I
I
I
: interpre-
neous
imaginary
thus
and the
,tus of the
question,
part of

endering
mce,"
:odified
rlap and
was less
1wing type
~ archi-
drawing
to the early
through
ifices
beyond
1s in the

I in the
nt to ortho-
hown in
Ion.
the
:e, both
·awing
::vans has
heavily
1rgani-
ue.18
dex Coner
netrically

: in the
1e per-
principally
1int.
arid the
e observer
'more
1 of sec-
perspec-
ective in
necessary
cument,

anal and
ficant
i's partic-
the emer-
·arated
leads to
;paces,
no longer restricted by the single static observation point of the
Codex Coner.
Lotz makes a claim of evolutionary teleology from the earlier
perspectival practices to the emergence of the strictly
orthographic
section. The perspectival section is principally an illustrative

practice, one that maximizes the visual appeal of a singular
image
to convey both profile and space and combines the quantifiable
with the perceptual. The orthographic section, on the other
hand,
is an instrument of metric description connected to the emer-
gence of codified forms of construction documentation.
However,
its increase in accuracy requires a multiplication of drawings to
provide the requisite information to comprehend complex
spaces
and architectural assemblies, as the absence of illusionistic
depth
flattens the legibility of spatial relationships.
This progressive bifurcation of orthographic section drawing

from perspectival practices coincides with architecture's
increas-
ing divergence as a discipline from the other fine arts during the
sixteenth century, as exemplified in the work of Sebastiano
Serlio.
The increasing use of the dimensionally accurate orthographic
section, complete with notations of construction logic, parallels
the emergence of the professional architect as distinct from the
master craftsman. Whereas elevations describe the image and
composition of architecture, a section is an instrument of
instruc-
tion, conveying to the builder the means and profile of erection.
Of the-three primary orthographic drawing types~plan,
e!evation.1
and section-it is section that aligns most closely to structural

and material designations. The typical orthographic section is in
many ways the most sophisticated, combining in one image two
types of representation: the objective profile marking the cut
and
the interior elevation beyond, describing the inhabitable space
made possible by the inscribed wall!'
The section's place in the standard repertoire of orthographic
representations is in clear evidence by the time Andrea
Palladio's
Four Books of Architecture was published in 1570. 20 Here
building
sections are paired with exterior elevations, each drawing type
describing only half of the building and aligned through the use
of only orthographic information. Interior perspectives that

might
better convey the experience of the work are suppressed in
favor
of measurable facts, reinforcing the conception of the architect
as the organizer of geometry. The symmetry of Palladio's work
enables this efficiency, which reduces the number of engravings
necessary to illustrate a building completely. With this pairing
the exterior elevation sits in juxtaposition to the interior
elevation,
the section serving to reveal the interplay between the shell of
the building and its interior disposition. In Palladio's work the
dis-
tinction and similarity between the section and the elevation are
deployed to full effect. While sharing the profile of the
building,

the elevation illustrates the composition and order of
architecture,
legacies of architecture as an aesthetic art. Section reveals the
material and mass necessary to construct the edifice, knowledge
unique to architecture as a profession aligned with the craft of
building. Palladio's section-elevation hybrids exemplify the
dual
nature of architecture as an art and a craft and illustrate the
Baldassarre Peruzzi, Pantheon, 1531-35
1
1
ru o'o ra:rnJlinJJtm1r1;~~
l; ITTili [~~-~ 0 roJlJ ~ d.-01 !J
!Jlfi,J .~ CJ O UM I :;J 121 mv;i CJ/ ----·---------- I ---,....,.,_,

Sebastiano Serlio, Project N13, from Book Vil of On
Domestic Architecture, ca. 1545
- --"""" -,.:1~.-.,;o
• 'I Pu
•
•
Andrea Palladio, La Rotonda, ca. 1570
29
..
/") ·0 @ J.I. r " . Pl~> P> •• ' . .
"·,,a.............~,
Andrea Palladio, baptisterium of Constantine, 1570
Etienne-Louis Boul!ee, cenotaph for Isaac Newton, 1784
Etienne-Louis Bou!lee, conical ceijotaph, ca. 1780
30

synthesis of the exterior and interior as quintessentially the
domain of the architect.
It is important to note that the load-bearing obligation of the
wall meant that for Palladio and his contemporaries, the shapes
of the wall, floor, and ceiling were coincident with the
structural
system. Yet if we compare the plan and the section, the very
same wall is rendered in completely opposite ways. In plan,
walls
are solid, filled in to reinforce the legibility of the organization
of rooms and spaces, which are left blank. The walls in section
are white, left as voids between the highly articulated interior
surfaces beyond. The plan is the privileged architectural figure,

with alignment between wall and spatial concept heavily
marked.
On a page, the plan dominates, setting the primary terms by
which the building as an architectural composition is to be read
and understood. In contrast, the material condition of the wall
in section is left as a void, a gap between rooms. While the plan
may organize, the section affords greater play among the shape,
form, and organization of the material being cut and the inhab-
itable architectural space framed by it. Ceilings curve to
disperse
gravitational load over the large volumes; invisible roof trusses
are given the same weight as the floor of the piano nobile; and
the
scale and size of each building are most clearly evident in
section.

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