Section Gang

You’d be correct if you were passing by the windows of the last Thursday night and thought you saw a reunion of old friends. Wine drinking, cheese eating, hug giving, and animated conversations filled the street-level galleries as Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, and David J. Lewis, founding principals of Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis (LTL Architects), welcomed over a hundred well-wishers for the launch of their new book, Manual of Biogenic House Sections (ORO Editions, 2022), and its accompanying exhibition.

Amid loud chatter, David Lewis gave an impromptu tour of the displays and told one visitor, “the future of modern architecture is thick.” The thin sections of steel and glass buildings, he continued, have had their moment. Of the five speculative houses that LTL designed as part of the exhibition, it’s the straw house—with nearly 24”-thick sections—that David hopes they’ll build next.

LTL has a longstanding love of the architectural section, both aesthetically and pedagogically. Biogenic House Sections showcases fifty-five houses from twenty-five different countries and presents these as case studies for a climate-positive architecture. The LTL team redrew each house to make precise Rhino 3D models, whose sections and exploded axonometrics populate most every page of the lavishly illustrated book. Classifying each house in relation to its primary low-carbon or carbon-sequestering material, the appendix offers a chocolate box of colorful section axonometrics.

In their previous book, Manual of Section (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016), the authors claim the section as the most productive starting point for their sustained investigations as architects and educators. “As a cut into that which cannot be seen,” they assert, “the section embodies and reveals territories for architectural experimentation and exploration.” In this new manual, a “sequel to and critique of” the previous one, the authors focus on building assemblies that feature plant-based or biogenic construction materials. For those of us who have spent many happy hours nerding out with Frank Ching’s comprehensive Building Construction Illustrated, LTL’s most recent manual will be a welcome companion.

After a four-day pop up at the Center for Architecture, the exhibit is now en route to its next venue at the University of Virginia. If you saw David Lewis and Marc Tsurumaki with their U-Haul trucks at a Waffle House on I-95 over the weekend, that’s where they were headed.