| Abstract: | The section is an essential tool for understanding, exploring, representing and communicating spatial relations, structure and materiality in architecture, design and engineering, and therefore a recurring topic in the curricula. The section itself is destructive of nature and incompatible with a built environment in use or under construction. Hence, students throughout their education meet the section in the form of diagrammatic representations, that is, as forms of meaning emptied from scale, spatiality and materiality. This article reports on a series of four workshops, held in the spring semesters from 2011 to 2014 for first‐year students at Aarhus School of Architecture. The aim was to provide first‐year students with an experience of the relation between the section as a diagrammatic representation and the materiality, structure and spatial relations of a concrete building. The climax of each workshop was a full‐scale dissection and transformation of an abandoned house. As we shall see, the workshops fulfilled not only the intended learning goals, but created an initially unforeseen and unique context for learning about the relations between building and place and introduced the question regarding depopulation of rural areas as a pertinent processional challenge. Beyond an educational value, the research project ‘Transformation on abandonment, a new critical practice?’ transpired from the workshops. This research project and the interplay between teaching and research are discussed in the last part of the article. |
