Detail Drawings and the Perception of Liminality

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 inside and outside, public and private, ex-posure and protection, and those 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 assem-blies and threshold devices, points where architecture becomes accountable to percep-tion 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 priori-ties, marking boundaries between what must be precisely resolved and what may re-main 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, pro-ducing perceptual tipping points where comfort can shift into irritation, calm into un-ease and openness into vulnerability. Although grounded in a local archive, the argu-ment 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.