Marc Tsurumaki: Manual of Section

Lecture by Marc Tsurumaki, discussing his work on the book, Manual of Section, completed in collaboration with his partners Paul Lewis and David Lewis.

Along with plan and elevation, section is one of the essential representational techniques of architectural design; among architects and educators, debates about a project’s section are common and often intense. Until now, however, there has been no framework to describe or evaluate it. Manual of Section fills this void. Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, and David J. Lewis have developed seven categories of section, revealed in structures ranging from simple one-story buildings to complex structures featuring stacked forms, fantastical shapes, internal holes, inclines, sheared planes, nested forms, or combinations thereof. To illustrate these categories, the authors construct sixty-three intricately detailed cross-section perspective drawings of built projects—many of the most significant structures in international architecture from the last one hundred years—based on extensive archival research. Manual of Section also includes smart and accessible essays on the history and uses of section.

Marc Tsurumaki is principal and founding partner of Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis (LTL Architects PLLC), an innovative, award-winning architecture partnership founded in 1997 with Paul Lewis and David J. Lewis in New York City. LTL Architects is the recipient of the 2007 National Design Award from the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and was selected as one of six American architectural firms featured in the U.S. Pavilion at the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale. Their work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art. The principals are co-authors of Intensities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), Opportunistic Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008) and Situation Normal….Pamphlet Architecture #21 (Princeton Architectural Press, 1998). Tsurumaki is a licensed architect and received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Virginia and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University.

Part of the Arguments Lecture Series organized by the M.S. Advanced Architectural Design program.