7/2/2008
Cut: Revealing the Section
SFMoMA, San Francisco
An opportunity to explore the section through 3 different modes-drawing, sculpture, and film. The exhibition includes some 12 section, ranging from Timothy Pflueger's elaborately detailed depictions of San Francisco's famed Castro Theater (1921) and Mario Botta's renderings of the SFMOMA building (1989) to more contemporary and abstract works by Joel Sanders and Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis. It also showcases Gordon Matta-Clark's film Splitting (1974).
From February 8 through June 8, 2008, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) presents Cut: Revealing the Section. Featuring a wide range of works from SFMOMA’s architecture and design collection, the exhibition is intended to deepen an awareness of the architectural section. The presentation is organized by Henry Urbach, SFMOMA’s Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design.
Comprising a vertical cut through space, the section is among the primary means by which architects and designers visualize, develop, and represent their work. It is a necessary complement to the architectural plan or map view, revealing the third dimension of height and, with it, volume, structure, and light.
Adjacencies denied by the plan imagine two individual apartments in a multistory building, one atop the other are revealed in the section cut, just as their proximity might host the transmission of noise, heat and water, and other transgressive elements. A drawing convention as essential as it is little understood, the section describes architectural space while simultaneously challenging its logic, revealing spatial relationships that the plan disallows.
Cut: Revealing the Section offers an opportunity to explore the section through three different modes—drawing, sculpture, and film. The exhibition includes some 12 section drawings, ranging from Timothy Pflueger’s elaborately detailed depictions of San Francisco’s famed Castro Theater (1921) and Mario Botta’s renderings of the SFMOMA building (1989) to more contemporary and abstract works by Joel Sanders and Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis. The exhibition also showcases Gordon Matta-Clark’s film Splitting (1974), perhaps the ultimate realization of the section cut as an act of anti-architecture.
Highlighted in the exhibition will be a new work by Peter Wegner, a paper wall, made of hundreds of thousands of sheets of paper, that will itself perform a section cut through the galleries, confronting visitors with a sculpture that is also a wall, and challenging them to perceive and move through the galleries in new ways. Also included is Wegner’s photographic suite Buildings Made of Sky (2004/2007), which reveals the section cut by showing midtown Manhattan streetscapes upside down, transforming the canyons between skyscrapers into buildings, each a slightly different shade of sky blue.
Image: Gordon Matta Clark, Splitting (still), 1974. Gelatin silver print. Collection SFMOMA © 2007 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
SFMOMA Communications Department, 415.357.4174 or commassistant@sfmoma.org.
Press: Sandra Farish Sloan, 415.357.4174, ssloan@sfmoma.org
SFMoMA
151 Third Street - San Francisco