Seeing and the Saw
Name
Jovanovic-marajov-arch-march-2026-thesis.pdf
Size
109.92 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
0e7afa60544e70d10f1150a8fad42129
Author(s)
Jovanovic, Mara
Advisor(s)
Norman, Carrie
Date Issued
February 2026
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
This thesis is about cutting. In our discipline, it’s cuts all the way down: projected cuts through buildings, which we call sections, are a ubiquitous way of proliferating architectural knowledge and taste; almost every line in such drawings stands in for some cut into matter. The thesis begins by studying that matter, and singling out grain as its familiar yet understudied property. Grain has a double sense: it refers both to the inscrutable interior structure of matter, and to the image of that structure revealed on its surface. It is strung between body and skin, tectonics and graphics, opacity and nudity. These senses are tethered and mediated by the cut. Beginning in the realm of the craftsman, the thesis charts a history of cutting as a cultural technique and a productive act, with attention to the changing relationships to grain our evolving tools have afforded. The protagonists are the knife and the saw, whose affordances, and their attendant ethics, have tacitly but relentlessly shaped our ways of seeing and knowing, and ultimately our tastes. The knife, which prefers to follow grain, encourages deference to the existing. The saw, engineered to disregard grain, incites an irreverent agnosticism towards the specificity of the found, allowing us to act projectively on matter, giving us grain in its vertiginous two-dimensional sense, and prefiguring a desire for flatness and flushness. Since matter moves, and sawn planarity is ultimately unstable, recurrent abrasion is needed to preserve its clarity. This lands us in the realm of architectural detail; from the French de-tailler, a detail literally is a cutting. The thesis concludes with a study and offering of cuttings which are informed by this history, and accordingly strung between abstraction and articulation, reverence and irreverence, clarity and vertigo.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture
Terms of Use
In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
Copyright retained by author(s)
Persistent DSpace Link
