4.2
Movement and the Use of the Sequential Section by Enric Miralles and Mathur and Da Cunha
A section is a measured drawing, an orthographic projection from a line in plan on to a vertical plane. It is a static abstraction of a particular built condition, to be understood in relation to the plan. It shows spatial variation and relationships in level. For the architect Enric Miralles and the landscape architects Anu Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, the section further became a means of exploring the experiential qualities of space and its relationship to human inhabitation. They adhered to the conventions of measured orthographic sections, but redefined them through overlay and repetition to make them expressive of human movement.
Paper and site
Miralles practised in Barcelona from 1984 to the time of his death in 2000. He won several key competitions in the 1980s, which led to the formation of his first office with another Spanish architect, Carme Pinos. Several of his projects contributed to his high international profile, including his design for the Igualada cemetery and the Olympic archery range for the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. He also taught at several design schools in Europe and the United States, including ETSAB in Barcelona and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. Anu Mathur is professor and associate chair of the landscape architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and collaborates frequently with fellow professor, architect and planner Dilip da Cunha. Together, they research how the visualization of water might expand possibilities for design practice. The body of their work is presented in three main books, published between 2001 and 2009, on the Mississippi River, the Mumbai peninsula and the Deccan plateau.
Both Miralles and Mathur and da Cunha perceived drawing and the space of paper as analogous to site. Miralles frequently equated the act of drawing a line to the act of construction. In an invited talk given during the Wednesday evening architectural lectures at SCI-Arc in 1989, Miralles noted, “the drawn line is anything else but, it is grasping, digging or moving the earth until finally a position deals with the topography.”1 He was describing the process of designing Igualada Cemetery, work he first commenced in response to a 1984 competition for a new cemetery in the Catalan town of Igualada, Spain: “This is how you
get to the space . . . it is trying to find with a pencil a place to put the dead.” The drawing of sections through the landscape of Igualada was for him a movement, a precise excavation that simultaneously shapes earth and experience.2
Mathur and da Cunha have equally suggested that the process of drawing is a process of constructing and reconstructing, particularly in relation to their work on the delta plain of Mumbai. In their book Soak, Mumbai in an Estuary, a detailed visual and textual examination of flood, drawing is no neutral technique. They are critically engaged in how and why one draws plans, sections and traditional maps, and what these drawings suggest about the comprehension of water and land. Mathur and da Cunha decry the insufficiencies of the master plan as a means of recording and responding to ecological processes and human movements. They note:
[The landscapes of Mumbai] call for the use of the section, an articulation that makes depth critical to the fluid relation between land and sea, while their drawing in sequence speaks to the diverse movement between the two. Sections also reduce the significance of boundaries and edges in the landscape, positing instead the horizon which one approaches but never crosses. They call attention to intersecting continuums rather than finite adjacencies. Finally, these landscapes diminish the importance of geographic space, the milieu within which surveyors measure distance accurately from point to point. Instead of space, they call for time, releasing landscapes from being held down to points in space and as such allowing the appreciation of their fluidity.3
Mathur and da Cunha argue that the representational devices of plans and surveys them -selves define a conceptual and imaginative position about water and its relationship to human inhabitation. A plan is concrete in its depiction of water as a channel-confined liquid. A section accommodates its depths: its flow from one kind of containment to another. A plan may enable the conception of a flood, which occupies the land beyond the river’s boundary, but the section enables a conception of water moving, of it falling, flowing and soaking.
Mathur and da Cunha’s drawing of the Mumbai peninsula is an accumulation of sections that reconfigure the relationship between water and land. Instead of suggesting mutually exclusive regions of wet and dry, they create a graphic representation of the interpenetration of water and land, where the movement of water is no longer delineated by channel lines, but land instead becomes an open surface, a sponge through which water flows and collects. Their sectional precision shows the uncertainty, the ambiguity, of where the limits are. The black sectional mass in the Mumbai drawing delineates both water and land, with no graphic break between them: there is a refusal to give water a definite edge. The articulation of land and sea is absent and ambiguous, suggesting movement, and so, with their use of the repeated section, Mathur and da Cunha reframe the “hydrological imagination.” It marks a shift in drawing convention from the master plan that characterized colonial and contemporary urban development in India, initiated by Patrick Geddes, who lived in Mumbai.4