The Joint as Liminal Threshold: Analyzing Detail Drawings in the Azrieli Architectural Archive

Abstract

Building details are often treated as technical externalities, subordinate to form, image and architectural narrative. Reading details as liminal spaces reverses that hierarchy. The joint concentrates transitions between the inside and outside, public and private, exposure and protection, and these transitions are constructed as intervals, experienced through thickness, reveal, edge condition, shadow, touch, and the small resistances that accompany crossing. The article develops its analysis through archival hand-drawn detail drawings from the Azrieli Architectural Archive. It defines building details as both technical assemblies and threshold devices, points where architecture becomes accountable to perception as well as to climate, labor, regulation, and everyday use. A semiotic reading of large-scale sheets shows how line weight, hatching, notation, and layout encode priorities, marking boundaries between what must be precisely resolved and what may remain adjustable. The archive is treated as a laboratory of “detail families,” recurring junction types such as windows, stairs, and envelope edges that reveal office-specific languages of joining. Two case studies, by the architects Ram Karmi and Arieh Sharon with Eldar Sharon, show how micro-variations in depth, overlap, and edge control tune thresholds, producing perceptual tipping points where comfort can shift into irritation, calm into unease, and openness into vulnerability. Although grounded in a local archive, the argument addresses a broader condition of contemporary practice: standardization and digital production chains can relocate authorship and responsibility away from the joint, precisely where buildings most affect everyday conduct. The paper proposes a liminal literacy of detailing as both a historiographic method and a design ethic aimed at making threshold decisions legible, contestable, and accountable in present-day workflows.

1. Introduction: From Construction Detail to Liminal Space

Architectural discourse and practice often privilege façades, morphology, and total images of buildings, while construction details are treated as technical residue [1]. Traditional architectural historiography has largely approached the detail through the lens of Tectonic Theory, where the joint is read as an ontological expression of construction [2,3]. Parallel to this, technical scholarship treats the detail drawing primarily as an instrument of execution, as a set of instructions aimed at labor and material efficiency [4]. Yet, many decisions occur at the millimetric scale, in joints and thresholds that bodies cross and where surfaces meet and touch. The sheets instruct construction, but they also record what an office chose to make explicit, what it left implicit, and where it concentrated care and risk.

Despite the technical importance of the building detail, a significant gap exists in architectural historiography: the absence of an account regarding how the ‘drawing of the joint’ functions as a record of intended perceptual experience. While technical manuals address ‘how’ to detail, they rarely address how these drawings calibrate the inhabitant’s sense of threshold. This paper addresses this gap by asking: How do archival detail drawings use graphic conventions to show thresholds as zones of passage rather than just lines between spaces? Which “detail families” (for example, windows, stairs, walls) repeat across projects and offices, and how do small variations within them shape how spaces feel, for example, legible, calm, or secure? Further, why do very small decisions at joints have such large effects on experience, and what kinds of architectural responsibilities are taken or avoided at these thresholds?

Two propositions guide the argument of this paper. First, building details are not only solutions to performance requirements. Details also operate as micro-manifestos, especially in window and door assemblies where thickness of the threshold articulation stage openness and protection, transparency and control, and the hierarchy between inside and outside.

Second, the concept of liminality provides the hinge in this paper by defining the threshold state of transition. Liminality describes the condition of being between states, and building details repeatedly materialize such in-between zones, such as interior and exterior, public and private, safe and exposed, structure and finish. These transitions are constructed and inhabited.

This article makes three contributions: a way to read archival detail sheets as evidence of liminal thinking; a comparative method of “detail families” that makes office-specific joining languages legible; and a bridge from mid-century hand-drawn detailing to contemporary conditions of standardization and digital workflows.

2. The Impact of the Detail

A building detail is often introduced as a technical document, a zoomed-in drawing that instructs construction (Merriam-Webster, “detail drawing”). That definition is accurate but incomplete: a detail is first a resolved assembly, a precise account of how parts meet, how loads transfer, how water is shed, how air is sealed, and how materials accommodate movement so construction can be executed reliably. Crucially, the degree of detail provided in these sheets directly corresponds to the anticipated qualifications of the manufacturers. A higher level of detail often signals a need to compensate for specific contractor skill levels, ensuring the project is implemented according to the client’s needs without constant intervention. Beyond its technical role in resolving loads and material tolerances [5], the detail functions as a threshold device, as the smallest site where architectural intention becomes accountable to everyday use.

By moving beyond the technical-versus-poetic debate, this study treats the detail as a “perceptual script.” What appears minor in plan becomes decisive in experience because architecture is encountered through sensory stimuli. Details mediate comfort, safety, and atmosphere through calibrations that often remain below conscious notice [6]. For example, a drawing of the entrance detail captures this threshold intelligence: the lower step projects beyond the brick wall and the landing is shaped to catch dirt from shoes before one enters the interior (Figure 1).

Detail drawings also have a distinct representational status. They operate at large scales, typically between 1:20 and 1:5, and even at 1:1. At these scales, the drawing stops describing overall form and begins describing contact: wall meets slab, window meets opening, roof meets parapet, hand meets rail. The sheet condenses decisions that cannot remain ambiguous, fixing what must align and what may deviate, what is continuous and what is separated, what is exposed and what is concealed. In that sense the detail sheet functions as a kind of architectural writing, a grammar of junction-making that carries technical and cultural values [7]. For example, the amount of information on the sheet varies, but it is organized to make the design idea and its execution easy to grasp (Figure 2).

Different kinds of details clarify this grammar. Some address hidden parts of the building, interfaces, subframes, and fixings that are drawn to be reliable and remain out of view. Others work as repetitive systems, facade modules, shading devices, precast connections, and cladding joints that are drawn in series and give the elevation a regular rhythm. A third group can be read as signature details, recurring choices about reveals, edges, profiles, expressed joints, and drainage grooves that show an office’s preferred way of working and project an ethos of precision, restraint, or care [2]. Architects’ offices developed unique details, especially for furniture, light fixtures, and even mailboxes, as a way of maintaining control over the overall design (Figure 3).

Liminality unifies these types; it describes the in-between condition of thresholds, spaces in which passing from one state to another becomes a concrete experience [8]. A threshold is never only an abstract boundary [9], it is a constructed condition in which multiple systems collide and must be negotiated into workable agreement. Detailing therefore operates across scales rather than beneath them. Architectural experience is shaped by urban arrangements and by building form, yet judgments about comfort, dignity, and legibility are often decided at the scale of the joint, where the macro claims of a project meet the micro realities of contact and wear.

3. Liminality as a Framework

Liminality names a condition of transition, classically theorized as “betwixt and between” in ritual of passage, where meaning intensifies because roles, boundaries, and expectations are temporarily reconfigured. Architectural thresholds produce a comparable intensification, not as metaphor but as construction. The in-between becomes a made interval with depth, sequence, and rules, and the joint is one of its primary material instruments. The concept aligns with Aldo van Eyck’s notion of the in-between as an active domain that reconciles opposed terms rather than merely separating them, which helps specify liminality here as an architectural condition rather than an imported analogy [9]. It also resonates with Louis Kahn’s insistence that the joint is where architecture declares its values, since the joint organizes how parts meet, how loads, weather, and tolerances are resolved, and how experience is staged at the meeting of elements [10]. Marco Frascari provides the hinge to detail culture by treating the detail as a bearer of narrative and intention, making the joint legible as both assembly and discourse [7]. Taken together, these frames clarify how liminality is used in this paper: as a lens for reading building details and detail drawings as constructed intervals where technical, perceptual, and ethical stakes concentrate.

In this article, the concept of liminality is applied to building details, treating details as places where transition is materialized through assembly. A threshold is never only a line in a plan [11]. Framing the detail as a threshold device clarifies why details can shape experience disproportionately, even when they appear minor. Architects decide whether a window reveal is thick or thin and how the window frame sits in the wall (Figure 4). These small choices shape glare and shade and how protected or exposed the boundary feels. They also decide the profile and height of a handrail, which affects the intimacy of touch and the confidence of movement on the stair [12].

Liminality shifts attention from the detail as an isolated technical solution to the detail as a site where multiple conditions intersect [13]. Therefore, liminal zones are where different logics meet and must be reconciled [14].

Detailing operates across scales because it links the project’s large claims about form, program, and presence to the small decisions that make performance, durability, and touch workable at the joint. Liminality therefore offers a vocabulary for describing how details shape everyday conduct and perception at points where architecture is most intensely inhabited [15]. Details are structured as in-between spaces that either visibly separate conditions or enable transitions between them, functioning as conceptual or physical zones between elements (Figure 5). Liminality is already present in representation, because the detail sheet marks boundaries between what must be precisely resolved and what may remain adjustable. Revisions, corrections, and variants on the hand-drawing sheets reinforce the point by showing the threshold as a site of iterative design refinement. These markings do not imply a negotiation with contractors. Instead, they reflect the architect’s internal struggle to settle a precise directive in the face of material and regulatory constraints.

Perception provides further justification; small physical changes can cross perceptual thresholds and produce large shifts in experience, while the mind reads wholes through parts, such that one anomalous detail can alter perceived stability, harmony, or safety (Figure 6). Thresholds are perceptually charged because attention intensifies during crossing and the body becomes more sensitive to friction, glare, temperature shifts, and tactile uncertainty [16].

4. Genealogy of Liminal Detailing

A genealogy of detailing places the detail-as-liminal-space within an established tradition of technical necessity. The history of design documentation confirms that the detail has always functioned as a primary directive. Whether etched in stone or drafted on vellum, the manner of execution serves a natural necessity, namely, the clarification of connection nodes for the benefit of manufacturers and the reduction in the designer’s supervisory burden [17]. Shifts in drawing culture, production, and professional organization repeatedly relocate meaning and responsibility into the joint, even when discourse foregrounds form or image [18]. In the nineteenth-century École des Beaux-Arts, detail drawings had already carried a double status as instruction and cultural object, with the joint serving as a primary site where competence and authority were displayed [19,20,21]. Modernism recoded this relationship: at the Bauhaus, the detail became a pedagogical instrument tied to materials, industry, and fabrication logic, shifting emphasis from ornamental finish toward system and discipline [22,23]. Standardization then pushed the micro-scale into the foreground as an explicit agenda, framing dimensions and tolerances as formative elements that choreograph bodily movement across boundaries [24]. Mid-twentieth century construction cultures intensified these dynamics through repetition and code-aligned legibility, while later tectonic discourse made explicit what practice long enacted, treating the junction as the place where construction and narrative meet and where ethics attach to making [2].

Built work can be read through this lens as well. Frank Lloyd Wright’s glass corners and frameless junctions between glass and stone walls, and Le Corbusier’s treatment of the door jamb to visually blend interior and exterior elements, produce in-between conditions in which a person is physically inside yet feels partially outside, occupying a threshold space. Such emotions could not manifest without meticulous attention to detail.

Contemporary practice, shaped by thicker envelopes and layered performance requirements, concentrates more demands at the boundary, making the liminal zone denser and more consequential. Within this lineage, the Azrieli Architectural Archive drawings can be read as liminal artifacts that record how architects calibrate thresholds.

5. Method: Archive, Selection and Comparative Reading

The Azrieli Architectural Archive at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art holds architects’ drawings from the early twentieth century to the present, with a concentration in the mid-twentieth century (Azrieli Architectural Archive, website: https://azrieliarchitecturalarchive.com/ accessed on 14 May 2026). Some offices preserved substantial bodies of detail drawings, yet archival volume does not necessarily reflect an office’s attitude toward detailing because the holdings also reflect later preservation choices by architects and families. To ensure a systematic analysis, the study implemented a multi-stage filtering process: from the broader archival corpus, drawings were prioritized based on the presence of large-scale (1:1 to 1:20) technical sheets, as these scales are where millimetric perceptual decisions are most legible. The study examined more than 350 detail drawings selected specifically for their membership in “detail families.” These recurring junction types, such as windows, stairs, and environmental envelopes, function as stable analytical categories that enable longitudinal and cross-office comparison (Appendix A).

Within the archive, some details operate as execution instructions, while others include elaborate annotation, meticulous specification, and axonometric or perspective views that suggest a broader intended audience than contractors alone. Historic drawings often attend even to what might seem minor or arbitrary, such as a window screen detail (Figure 7). The analysis does not foreground local political context. Instead, it reads the drawings in visual and operative terms, treating them as semiotic proxies for intended sensory experience. The archive functions as a laboratory where recurring thresholds allow office-specific languages of joining to be traced through patterns, habits, and calibrated deviations.

A three-layer strategy structures the analysis. First, graphic reading functions as a coding process for perceptual indicators. It examines scale, precision, conventions, and page organization to identify a hierarchy of care, utilizing line weight as a proxy for visual focus and notation density as a marker of the specific zones where the architect concentrated their perceptual agency. Second, comparative reading places different offices’ solutions for the same family side by side to describe office language as a consistent way of staging transitions, while distinguishing office ethos from broader construction culture shaped by codes, standard products, and material availability. Third, contextual cross-reading connects drawings to specifications, correspondence, and project records to clarify accountability and constraints such as budget, fabrication, and regulation. Across these layers, micro-variations in reveal depth, offsets, slopes, drip edges, and hand-contact surfaces are tracked as tuning operations that recalibrate transitions. By defining these indicators, the methodology establishes a reproducible framework for analyzing architectural intentionality. Where possible, the method extends to an “as drawn, as built, as modified” reading by comparing archival intent with later repairs and additions that often cluster at thresholds.

6. Perceptual Thresholds at the Joint

A joint is where architecture touches the body most directly. A railing, a door threshold, or a window frame may appear minor, yet each functions as a physical stimulus that shapes sensory experience (Figure 8). The experience of a building is not that of a single neutral whole, it is built up through repeated encounters with edges, surfaces, temperatures, shadows, resistances, and tactile cues. The architectural detail is rarely concerned only with technical utility; instead, it marks the exact point at which a junction shifts from being merely functional to achieving perceptual resonance and a sense of safety.

Psychophysics offers a vocabulary for why small changes matter. Heinrich Weber and Gustav Fechner (1966) suggest that very small physical differences [25], in millimeters, slight shifts in tone, or subtle variations in texture can cross a perceptual threshold and produce a disproportionately large change in experience. A minimal adjustment can shift how a space feels, from secure to unstable, ordered to chaotic, comfortable to irritating. Stanley Smith Stevens’ power law (1957) sharpens the point by emphasizing nonlinear response across sensory modalities such as light, temperature, and touch [26]. The same physical change does not always feel the same. Once a stimulus crosses the point at which the body begins to register it, experience can change sharply. Recent research in embodied cognition and architectural neuroscience supports these findings, suggesting that our peripheral perception is highly sensitive to the ‘micro-affordances’ of edge conditions [27,28]. These studies prove that the brain processes the ‘atmospheric’ quality of a room through the tactile and visual signals sent by junctions and material transitions [29].

The logic becomes clearer when tied to thresholds. The threshold is experienced through pressure on a step, contact with a rail, a temperature shift at a reveal, and a shadow line that thickens or thins the boundary. Archival drawings make these zones readable because they render passage as an interval with depth, sequence, and rules, rather than as a set of lines. A few degrees change in the angle of a shutter can reduce glare enough to transform perceived comfort. At the boundary, perception is already heightened. Crossing intensifies attention; minor calibrations at the joint can therefore tip the experience of passage, pause, or contact.

Gestalt psychology adds a second layer, shifting attention from stimulus intensity to perceptual organization. This analysis tracks how line weight, hatch, and notation density, used here as measurable indicators of care, direct attention to certain interfaces while suppressing others. Psychophysics and Gestalt are used here as a reading protocol for construction drawings, where thresholds are treated as sequences of cues rather than single lines. The analysis tracks how line weight, hatch, notation density, and sheet layout direct attention to certain interfaces while suppressing others, and how repetition across detail families acts as a perceptual training device that stabilizes expectations. One emphasized or anomalous detail can shift the perceptual balance of an entire environment [30], while small deviations can also signal risk, hierarchy, or intensified performance demands (Figure 9). Figure-ground effects are identified, where poche, shadow lines, and layer stacking make boundaries appear thick, recessed, or continuous; as such, the drawing does not only document assembly, it scripts how continuity, separation, and transition will be perceived at the built interface.

Archival detail drawings are crucial evidence for these dynamics because they preserve micro-decisions that buildings later naturalize. Careful inspection reveals variations in line thickness, corner radius, reveal depth, slopes, offsets, and alignments. Such changes are rarely arbitrary; they often indicate iterative refinement, a practice of tuning. Even if mid-century architects did not describe their work in the language of psychophysics, the drawings show an acute awareness of thresholds through repeated adjustments in dimension and proportion. A shift in edge condition can alter tactile confidence, visual comfort, and the perceived thickness of a boundary. Reading these sheets therefore uncovers more than technical information. It reveals a latent perceptual intelligence embedded in detailing, a search for the point at which material form meets human experience.

Perceptual thresholds at the joint therefore function as a bridge concept for the article. They connect millimetric evidence in the archive to a claim about architectural experience: details shape how boundaries are sensed and interpreted. The joint emerges not as a secondary technical matter but as a primary site where architecture becomes embodied, where small calibrations govern passage, comfort, and the meaning of the threshold.

7. Case Studies

The two offices’ hand-drawings study shows how threshold experience is tuned into where elements meet and how the smallest adjustments often carry the largest perceptual consequences. Two architects’ office collections in the Azrieli Architectural Archive are examined in the case studies: Ram Karmi’s office, and the office of Arieh and Eldar Sharon. The offices were selected based on the size of their collections, the informational richness of the sheets, and the period they cover.

7.1. Ram Karmi: Lady Davis—Amal School as Liminal Transition of Details

Ram Karmi’s approach to detailing developed in continuity with the practice of his father, Dov Karmi, and matured during the 1960s and 1970s, when Brutalism prevailed in international architectural discourse. Rough surfaces, exposed structure, and disciplined joints formed a shared architectural language [31,32]. Karmi’s work shows sustained attention to concrete detailing, both precast and cast-in-place, and consistent care for joints, tolerances, and the legibility of assembly. Although the discussion here focuses on a single building, similar commitments to junction-making appear in projects such as Beit El-Al, Tel Aviv (1963), Merkaz HaNegev, Beer Sheva (1966), and Beit Hadar-Dafna, Tel Aviv (1971).

The school, inaugurated in 1972, offers an intensive demonstration of this detail culture (Figure 10 and Figure 11). Attention to the joint extends across interior spaces, exterior faces, and the plaza, shaping walls, floors, stairs, ceilings, and rails. Experience is organized through transitions, and details amplify those transitions by giving each zone a distinct material and spatial identity. Ceilings provide a clear example: in classrooms, reinforced concrete waffle slabs integrate lighting within the structural grid (Figure 12). Even the fiberglass mold used for the concrete ceiling was drawn at a 1:1 scale (Figure 13). Beyond structural efficiency, the repeated grid produces a perceptual rhythm that stabilizes orientation and organizes the ceiling plane overhead [33].

In laboratories, the ceiling takes the form of an inverted barrel vault (Figure 14). Curved rows are separated by flat slabs, while fluorescent fixtures deliver softer, more diffuse artificial light. The change in ceiling type registers as an atmospheric shift at the moment of movement. Section drawings clarify that the laboratory ceiling is conceived as a repeatable unit rather than a singular sculptural gesture (Figure 15). The inverted profile is stabilized through consistent edge conditions at its springing points and by a carefully articulated perimeter where the roof build-up meets the wall. Graphic emphasis concentrates at these junctions, suggesting that the experiential difference between classroom and laboratory is engineered at the joint as much as through overall form.

Concrete surfaces intensify this threshold logic; reinforced concrete walls combine with precast elements, and exposed material carries the grain of timber formwork. The horizontal and vertical imprint reads as a calibrated field of shadow and texture, especially around window zones where light meets surface. For example, the classrooms’ walls tilt inward, subtly altering enclosure and directing attention toward openings. Such shifts operate at the threshold, where geometry can change the felt balance between stability and movement, openness and containment. This creates a ‘tactile acoustic’ in the hallways; the rough grain of the timber formwork softens the light and absorbs sound, transforming a standard institutional corridor into a focused, protective transition zone that signals a shift in student conduct.

However, the archive also reveals the “anomalous detail,” moments where the material reality of the early 1970s hampered the architect’s liminal intent. While the 1:20 sections for the Lady Davis school suggest a fluid, ‘calm’ transition between the heavy concrete envelope and the interior plaster, the 1:1 execution sheets reveal an unresolved technical compromise with the cast-in-place tolerances of the time. The resulting joint, thickened by oversized sealants and irregular formwork gaps, records the difficulty of maintaining the intended liminal experience against the industrial limitations of the building site.

Moreover, the entrance portal can be interpreted as a liminal device. A welcoming staircase leads to a prismatic concrete gate element above the entrance, while integrated light fixtures mark the school’s threshold. Outside, concrete rails frame the staircase on both sides, and before the portal. The threshold is marked where the concrete rails terminate before the portal, continuing inside as steel rails (Figure 16). Interruption and continuation produce a deliberate transition between exterior guidance and interior order, reinforced by lighting along the sides of the portal. Further detail sheets extend this logic across the envelope. Repeated elements form a graded boundary, and sections show how offsets, fixings, and thickness determine whether the facade reads as porous, protective, or inert.

The building can thus be read as a celebration of detail, not as ornament but as an insistence that architectural experience is made at the joint. Movement from exterior to interior, and from shared zones to classrooms and laboratories, is choreographed through tuned changes in light, texture, and orientation, securing the project’s experiential coherence.

7.2. Arieh and Eldar Sharon: Modular Envelopes and Liminal Depths

The Sharon office presents a sustained trajectory in which detailing moves from disciplined modernist clarity toward more experimental geometry that demands new joints, new edges, and new thresholds. The practice begins with Arieh Sharon, a Bauhaus graduate, and the establishment of his Tel Aviv office. When Eldar Sharon joined in the mid-1960s, the inherited rationalism remained, yet it was redirected through the spatial ambitions of the period [34]. Structuralist and Metabolist currents encouraged angled surfaces, envelopes, and systems composed of repeatable units rather than stable orthogonal boxes. Once walls tilt and envelopes fold, invention concentrates at the joint, because geometry becomes inhabitable through the way elements meet.

The office’s drawings make that shift legible through recurring detail families that stage liminality as thickness, overlap, and calibrated in-between space. Sharon’s detail sheets develop a cellular geometry of triangular elements, with plan and axonometric clusters accompanied by small section sketches of panel edges and corners, as seen in the prefabricated fiberglass living unit project (Figure 17). Graphic emphasis falls on meeting lines, rigidifying edges and connection logic that preserves continuity across modules. The unit can be read as both architectural and object-like, positioned between building and product. That ambiguity produces a liminal condition in itself. The capsule is an engineered enclosure that must still negotiate ground contact, openings, and occupation through precise edge decisions.

Another family addresses screens and facade filters, as seen in projects such as the Sackler (today “Gray”) Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, Tel Aviv University (1973) (Figure 18), Beit America-Israel (1973) (Figure 19), and the Gilo neighborhood housing in Jerusalem (1976). Concrete vertical slats and ribbed members appear in elevation and axonometric fragments, anchored by brackets and edge profiles. These are not merely decorative devices, they construct depth in front of a plane, turning the facade into a liminal field where the gaze is held between interior and exterior (Figure 20). Transparency becomes conditional: light is modulated through repetition, and privacy is achieved without full opacity. Seriality produces rhythm, while corners and shifts in spacing mark charged moments of transition. Facade design also reshapes interior experience when walls tilt inward. In the Sackler project, for example, the sections show repetitive precast elements that produce capsule-like interior surfaces facing outward (Figure 21). The ‘impact’ of this detail is a literal calibration of the occupant’s visual horizon. By placing the slats at a specific interval, the architect does not just ‘shade’ the room; they dictate a rhythmic pulse of light that forces the eye to focus on the distant landscape while maintaining a sense of interior enclosure.

The Sackler project further illustrates the tension between graphic intent and material execution. The archive contains several revisions of the precast connection details that attempt to maintain a “perceptual resonance” of lightness. Yet, the final as-built drawings show a shift toward more robust, less “liminal” junctions required to satisfy maintenance and waterproofing regulations. By identifying these anomalous moments, we can see that the office’s liminal literacy was not a purely aesthetic choice, but a constant negotiation with the resistances of material reality.

Another family grounds the office language at the scale of the body. Chairs and benches, carefully dimensioned in profile, appear in early drawings and treat posture as a design problem (Figure 22). Over the years, furniture details were maintained and updated in response to new materials and changing tastes. More sophisticated profiles, curvature, thickness, and support become micro-decisions that govern comfort and attention. The same intelligence that organizes screens and seams appears here in tactile form (Figure 23).

Taken together, the drawings describe an office language defined by modular thinking and thickened boundaries. Liminal space is produced through depth, repeated interval, hinge, and seam. Architectural experience is tuned where elements meet, and the smallest transitions often carry the largest perceptual consequences.

8. Discussion: Toward a Liminal Literacy of Detailing

The analysis points to three implications for contemporary practice. First, detailing concentrates architectural responsibility at points of contact and passage. Millimetric decisions in stairs, handrails, thresholds, sills, reveals, and parapets shape whether a boundary is experienced as generous or harsh, legible or confusing, safe or exposed. Evaluation therefore shifts from mere correctness toward an ethics of transition, asking how joints regulate comfort, dignity, and control in everyday life. Liminal literacy remains important for the future of professional development because it ensures that even as tools change, the architect retains the ability to produce the clear, authoritative directives required to translate theory into built reality [35]. This is especially critical as the relationship between the detail and the builder’s qualification is increasingly obscured by automated protocols [36].

Second, liminal decisions are not only built, but they are also communicated. The archival collections examined for this study include digital drawings as well as hand-drawn sheets, and the research findings regarding the calibration of the joint refer to these digital records also. This confirms that the logic of liminality remains a primary site of architectural agency regardless of the representational medium. However, the archival evidence reveals a distinct shift in the quality of liminal expression when moving from hand-drawn to digital media within the same office. While hand-drawn sheets preserve a tangible ‘signature’ of the architect through unique millimetric adjustments, the digital environment often encourages a ‘copy-and-paste’ logic. By utilizing standardized, off-the-shelf details, the specific calibration of the joint is frequently replaced by generic, replaceable protocols. This transition fundamentally alters the liminal expression, as the unique, iterative tuning of the threshold is increasingly substituted by modular solutions that can distance the designer’s specific intent from the physical interface. Representation does not simply transmit information [37]; line weight, hatch, notation, and layout establish a hierarchy of attention and accountability, defining which boundary matters most, where continuity is demanded, and where tolerance is permitted. Notes and tags translate intent into instruction and responsibility, marking what must be resolved and what can be delegated. Revisions and alternative versions reveal the threshold as a site of design refinement where construction logic and material constraints are resolved. While this research primarily examines the architect’s intended impact through a semiotic reading of the drawings, it acknowledges the gap between archival representation and the finished product. However, by comparing “as-drawn” intents with site observations, the study demonstrates that the drawing functions as a set of “perceptual instructions” that largely dictate the sensory boundaries of the built work.

Third, assembling details as “families” enables comparison without reducing offices to style. Repetition becomes evidence of stable priorities [38]; a family is less a catalog of parts than a typology of transitions. When similar junction problems recur across projects, the archive shows how practices repeatedly choose where to thicken the boundary, where to separate layers, and where to expose assembly or conceal it. Office language emerges through recurring decisions about reveal depth, edge condition, shadow lines, and layer separation, while broader shifts in regulation and construction culture push some solutions toward standardization without eliminating office-specific tuning. The archival study of hand-drawn details reveals a millimetric flexibility that is often obscured by the standardized families of digital production chains. While scholars like Antoine Picon (2010) have noted that digital culture shifts the architect’s role from “shaper” to “editor,” the archive shows exactly what is lost when this editing occurs: the specific, non-standardized calibration of the threshold [39].

Together, these findings support a liminal literacy of detailing that treats the joint as a primary site where architecture becomes accountable to everyday life. This literacy provides a critical benchmark for evaluating how much agency architects retain over the millimetric scale in the transition to AI-integrated workflows and “generative” detailing [40]. This is not a claim of diminished quality, but an observation of a shift in “digital authorship” [41], where the visibility of the joint is mediated by software protocols rather than direct graphic intention. Further research should examine how BIM protocols and AI-assisted workflows redistribute authorship, liability, and the visibility of liminal decisions. When details are no longer fixed to a drawing scale, digital zoom changes how scale is understood and used.

The ‘Liminal Analysis Toolkit’ presented here, which involves coding for line weight, notation density, and layered thickness, provides a transferable method for researchers to decode the perceptual intentions of any archival collection, regardless of the office or period.

9. Conclusions

Building details are often treated as technical externalities, subordinate to form, image, and architectural narrative. Reading details as liminal spaces reverses that hierarchy. The joint is where architecture becomes accountable because it concentrates transition between inside and outside, public and private, exposure and protection. These are not abstract oppositions, they are constructed intervals, experienced through thickness, reveal, edge condition, shadow, touch, and the small resistances that accompany crossing. Liminality clarifies why the millimetric scale carries disproportionate stakes: thresholds are where perception intensifies, where comfort can tip into irritation, calm into unease, and openness into vulnerability. If liminality concentrates at the joint, then drawing matters because it is where that concentration becomes legible. Keeping the detail drawable, in any medium, keeps accountability attached to the threshold.

Detail drawings preserved in the Azrieli Architectural Archive provide evidence for this claim. They show threshold thinking not as an afterthought, but as a disciplined practice of resolution. Page organization establishes hierarchies of attention and responsibility, making visible what must be fixed precisely and what may remain adjustable. Corrections, variants, and repeated assemblies show detailing as calibration rather than mere specification. The archive therefore allows the detail to be read as both instruction and discourse, a semiotic field where architectural values are written into the joint.

The comparative lens of detail families strengthens the argument. Recurrent junction problems show how offices develop distinctive languages of joining, expressed through consistent choices about separation and continuity, shading and exposure, protection and openness. These languages are not only aesthetic, they are ethical and perceptual. They shape how boundaries are felt and how buildings are maintained over time, as repair and retrofit pressures often concentrate at liminal zones.

Current detailing culture often routes decisions through digital toolchains that can hide threshold choices behind product defaults, liability partitions, and checklist thinking. However, the study of archival sheets reveals a millimetric flexibility that is often obscured by these standardized families. This resonates with critiques in digital theory suggesting that parametric and AI tools can decouple design intent from the material “trace” of the joint [42].

Approaching details as liminal spaces reframes architectural history and practice alike. The joint is not the place where architecture ends. It is the place where architecture happens. It is a site of natural necessity where technical assembly, labor management, and embodied experience converge, and where the smallest decisions carry the largest consequences.

Figures

* All figures are courtesy of the Azrieli Architectural Archive, Tel Aviv Museum of Art.