DETAIL:  The dealing with matters item by item; detailed treatment; attention to particulars; to deal with or treat a thing in its individual particulars.
An item, a particular;a minute or subordinate portion of any (esp. a large or comples) whole.
A minute or subordinate part of a building, scultpure or painting, as distinct from the larger portions or the general onception. such minute parts collectively or the manner of treatment of them.

Almost by nature, by definition, architects are obsessed with details. Who else would notice if a series of screwheads were aligned in the same direction? If there is one thing virtually all architectural practices have in common, an approach or philosophy of design is pursued and revealed through the detail. A study of detail afforded us the opportunity to focus on the moment where a design idea (or ideology) (meets) the practical, material necessity of construction. Furthermore, the universal concern with the specificities of a project, common to both the most corporate and the most speculative design pracitces suggested to us the possiblity of registering some of the issues facing all architects today. We hoped that in the same way it is often possible to understand a project through a detail--the macro via the micro--that it might be possible to read the current state of practice through a study of several (dont like serveral) of its details

However, as the content of the journal became more clearly defined, the issue of exactly what constitutes a detail became less so. While the work of Carlos Scarpa embodies the conventional notion of detail, historically, US practices associated with detail—Mies, Sullivan, early Wright—have more often used detail as an expression of a stylistic idea. In a preface to a collection of details from his oeuvre, published in 1964, Phillip Johnson wrote “Can we ever speak meaningfully of details today? The Guggenheim Museum of the 1950s has none, not even a stair rail. Details today are hardly more than enlarged structural connections and corners.” Almost fourty years later we find ourselves asking what is a detail today?

Even the broader dictionary definition quoted above fails to provide a definition of detail as most architects understand the word, frequently used as a verb. To detail is not only to specify, but to privledge one portion of a project over another. Although all architects detail, what they choose to detail is what distinguishes one practice from another. The drawn detail represents  a moment of concern for the designer--a condition too significant to the project and potentially too ambiguous to be configured within the accepted standards of the tradesman-builder.  What architects usually detail are non standard methods of assembly or fabrication: the detail of the connection of gypsum board to wood studs or to metal studs is rarely drawn (except in response to liablitiy or permitting issues) because the exact means by which the connection is achieved is simply not important enough to warrant a detail. If the ususal construction standards are accpetable, or if the detail is sufficiently unambiguous, the resolution of details are merely left to the tradesman or to the oxymorinicaly termed “standard details.” However, in reality, the very definition of detail prevents its standardization--in its individuality, in its difference from the norm and in its meriting of particular concern.

Although we have tried to feature diverse approaches to the detail, the range of positions in this issue are by no means exhaustive. We sought to present projects of disparate scale—from furnture to infrastructure, and of different ideological conceits—from a singular precious connection or assembly, to a prototype piece modified in response to local necessity as it is multiplied to create almost entire project.

What we did discover was these projects, and their “details” had some striking similarities, depite the scalar, geographical, material, and blah differences.

Detail often represents a contradiction between what is actual and what is desired. Mies’ famous crown hall column detail expresses the desire for exposed structure in the face of the reality of the vulnerablity of steel to fire. The glue-lam beams in the house for a film producer run uninturrupted from interior to the exterior (necessitating the end-grain be sealed and re-painted) alluding to a desire for continuity between interior and exterior spaces despite the need for enclosure to accommodate privacy, security, and weather.

Almost without exception, the design process entails a negotiation between scales from the macroscale to the microscale and back via the detail. (I ran out of gas on this one entirely, but it should be developed.-- I think klotz would be a good example)

The detail is perhaps the place where the translation from drawing to material form is most immediate. Not only are the scale of details drawn more approximatetly to actual size, but in the large scale both enables and requires that material qualities, thickness, shapes, pliablity are incorporated. A plan, section or elevation remains a diagram which can be constructed of many materials with varying results. In taking account for material specificity, a detail begins to take into account the limits of those materials. Paradoxically, while the relation to the built object becomes more immediate, the relation to the diagram of the project as a whole is usually more abstract.

In most of these projects, the detail provides a moment for innovation and the introduction of new technologies. The greater the innovation and the newer the technology the more the need to detail. (needs elaboration)

Perhaps the most unexpected quality of the detail we discovered as the journal developed, was the need to frequently reclarify for ourselves the distinction between material and detail. Somehow, the current relation of the two made this difficult. Most of the projects presented here use materials in a way the maximizes or comments on the very nature of the material itself. 

As a working hypothesis, if the detail of the 20th century, the age of mechanical reproduction, details were primarily understood as joints—moments of specificity, of uniqueness, singularity, of non-reproducibility which stood as a reaction or resistance to mass production., and as a means to distinguish architecture from building. Perhaps the detail of the 21st century, the age of virtual reality, is a material detail. In a cyber world of virtual community, virtual reality and online community, perhaps the materiality of architecutre becomes paramount., The material and material nature of the world of a project becomes critical, worthy of a detail. In Bernard Cache’s work, which Peggy Deamer discusses, the joint is not even relevant. The detail becomes the articulation in the depth of the surface of a single material. However, even in the thinnest of material applications, such as the weathering steel panels of Shim-Sutcliffe’s weathering steel house, the inherent materiality of the steel is significant and in fact is the sole reason for its use. The “stitched” steel detail which enables Office dA’s MOMA fabrications to be simultaneously skin and structure, simultaneously thin and deep, is a detail insperable from its material qualities. In one way or another, all  eleven projects represented here the detail is inseperable from the material.

Despite the commonalities, It is in the detail, that architectural practices most distinguish themselves. (nice closing idea, badly executed). 

note:
Phillip Johnson, “Architectural Details” Architectural Record, April 1964, p. 137.

OUTTAKES
detail which is repeated and modified projects which focus on the singularity of a non -repetitive or precious detail to projects in which detail is almost supressed in service of the whole to  projects which use a few repetitive details the collection of form a larger effect to a series of  detail which represents a collection of fragments.