The Reference Library: Generic Block, Special Collections

Specific drawing types—plan, section, axonometry, and so on—are selectively utilized as both abstractions toward discursive ends and codified into standards of building practice. As new techniques of vision, image formats, and modeling software enter ubiquity, the ‘drawing’ is dislodged and design is frequently a matter of deleting and editing blocks.
Section, and in particular, the wall section, has been tethered to certain ways of working on and understanding architecture.
The wall section served as the primary means for understanding the nexus of tectonic, material, structural, and environmental systems.

Working in groups, students designed and constructed single wall sections as ‘instance blocks’, specific occurrences of a generalized system proliferated as a series sited at UCLA. The individual instance block can be considered a front-loaded design model in which design decisions are posed as methods of managing, deleting, and editing. Complexity is pre-existing, not generated.