Cutaway or cross-section drawings are mostly just fancy residues of a long-gone era when engineering and architecture visualisation was based on hand-drawn images that were often closer to art than boring illustration.
Today, when mostly CAD and computer graphics rule the field, the following selection of images from the past seems so exciting. Make sure you click on the “expand” button on each picture to see all the delicious little details! And feel free to add your favourite cutaway building in the discussions below.
Section showing the interior of Wyld’s Monster Globe, which stood in Leicester Square, London, from 1851 to 1861.
Image: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
An artist’s impression showing of the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida, 1974.
Image: Space Frontiers/Getty Images
1950: Diagram of a typical subway bomb shelter proposed for New York City in a 104 Million dollar bomb shelter program outlined by the Board of Transportation.
Image: AP
1968: Drawing of the 10×10 foot wind tunnel at the Glenn Research Center.
Image: NASA/Glenn Research Center
1955: the 16-Foot high speed tunnel (HST) at the Langley Research Center.
Image: NASA/Langley Research Center
Cutaway illustration of the Neutral Buoyancy Simulator (NBS) at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), ca. 1968.
Image: NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center
Architect and city planner Oscar Newman’s plan of a massive underground sphere beneath Manhattan, 1969.
Image: Ptak Science Books
A family in their backyard underground bomb shelter, early 1960s.
Image: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Wylfa Magnox nuclear power plant, Wylfa, Anglesey, UK, 1965.
Image: Nuclear Engineering International magazine
An early space station concept drawing appeared in the 1959 Space The New Frontier brochure produced by NASA.
Image: NASA
Tank assembly lines, 1942.
Image: x-ray delta one
Food market, 1950.
Image: x-ray delta one
Ice cream factory, 1951.
Image: x-ray delta one
Fred Freeman’s impression of a lunar base, 1952.
Image: x-ray delta one
Crossing the River Mersey, Liverpool.
Image: x-ray delta one
An underwater condo complex.
Image: x-ray delta one
Atomic power plant of the future imagined by Ray Pioch in the Fifties.
Image: x-ray delta one
1962: The Space Needle, Seattle.
Image: x-ray delta one
Palace of the Soviets, Moscow, concept by Boris Iofan, 1936.
Image: Glen.H
Piccadilly Circus cutaway, London Transport Museum, 1989. Illustration by Gavin Dunn.
Image: magpie-moon
Draft artwork for the Naval Cathedral in Kronstadt by Vasily and Georgy Kosyakov, 1903.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
1859: design of Chersones Cathedral of St. Vladimir by David Grimm. East-west cutaway.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
“Aerial cutaway view of the Bank of England from the south-east” — a watercolour by Joseph Michael Gandy, 1830, courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum.
Image: ArchiPress
The Metro Rail station at 5th and Hill, Los Angeles, 1983.
Image: Metro Transportation Library and Archive
View of a proposed Red Line station at Wilshire and La Brea, Los Angeles, 1983
Image: Metro Transportation Library and Archive
Plan of BBC television centre, London, 1958.
Image: tvstudiohistory.co.uk
Bonus photo: Architect Paolo Soleri rests in front of his “3-D Jersey,” a cutaway model on display at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, Feb. 17, 1970. It’s his idea of a supersonic jetport and city that might be built on the mud flats of New Jersey across the Hudson River from New York City. The structure he suggests is not just a jetport but a city, including hanging sunlit gardens, terminals and offices, hotels and theatres, and dwellings for one million.
Photo: Bob Daugherty/AP
Top image: the Dungeness B nuclear reactor, Kent, England — Nuclear Engineering International magazine