# A cutaway tower where the floor names are the plot

> An isometric cutaway labels a tower EXECUTIVE down to SUB-LEVEL. It's a class diagram wearing an architectural drawing, and one floor near the bottom still has its lights on.

August 19, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/corporate-arcology-cutaway

A stepped tower, sliced open in isometric line work, five bands labelled top to bottom: `EXECUTIVE`,
`RESIDENTIAL`, `PLANT`, `SERVICE`, `SUB-LEVEL`. Tiny figures stand at doorways for scale. Near the
bottom, one floor is lit amber while the rest sit in outline.

The labels aren't architecture. They're a seating chart for an entire society, drawn as a section
through a building.

## What is a cutaway actually for?

Showing what a photograph of the outside never could: who is where, and what that costs to reach.

An elevation shows a skin. A cutaway shows floors, and floors have to be labelled to mean anything —
which is the whole reason this drawing works as more than an engineering exercise. Name a floor
`EXECUTIVE` and put it at the top, name another `SUB-LEVEL` and put it at the bottom, and the
building has told you the entire arrangement before a single figure appears in a doorway.

Nothing about a tower requires that its best floor be its highest one. It's a choice, drawn as
though it were physics.

## Why isometric projection rather than a normal drawing?

Because isometric has no vanishing point, and a vanishing point is a kind of favouritism.

In one-point or two-point perspective, whatever sits nearest the vanishing point reads as most
important by construction — the drawing itself decides where the eye goes. Isometric refuses that:
every floor is drawn at the same angle, the same apparent weight, no floor visually outranks another.
Which means the only thing doing the work of telling a reader `EXECUTIVE` outranks `SUB-LEVEL` is
the label. The projection can't help; the words have to.

That's a deliberate transfer of authority from the drawing to the text, and it's the reason this
format reads as a document rather than as art.

## What makes the tiny figures worth including?

They convert a diagram into a place somebody has actually stood in.

A cutaway with no figures is pure abstraction — bands of colour with words on them. Add a handful of
figures, drawn at consistent scale in doorways and on stairs, and the same drawing becomes a
building with people currently inside it, which is a very different feeling. The figures don't need
faces or detail. Scale and posture are enough; the eye supplies the rest.

### Where to put the one lit floor

One amber-lit floor against an otherwise unlit, purely linear building is the detail that makes
the whole design specific rather than generic. Put it low, near `SERVICE` or `SUB-LEVEL`, and it
reads as somebody working after the building above them has gone home — the one occupied space in
a tower mostly drawn as an outline.

## Does this work for a building I actually know?

Invent the tower and its floor names, rather than drawing a real address.

A specific real building's floor plan, tenant list or internal layout is somebody's proprietary
information, and reproducing it accurately enough to be recognisable brings that with it. What
survives without any of that trouble is the *arrangement* — a hierarchy expressed as floors, labelled
plainly, cut open to show it. That arrangement has no owner, and it says just as much about a real
workplace's org chart as it does about an invented arcology.
[The convention is public; a specific building's plan isn't](/stories/game-box-back-cover-layout).

## Is this too similar to a skyline print?

It's the opposite of one, and that's the reason it belongs in this material.
[The neon skyline is the genre's most repeated image and argues nothing](/stories/cyberpunk-print-design);
a labelled section through a single building argues a specific thing about who gets which floor. A
skyline is a mood. A cutaway is a claim, with the evidence for the claim printed right on it.

Five clean bands and a lit floor say more about the world than a thousand lit windows would.

## Does it print well?

Yes, in fine cream line work on a dark ground — deep navy or charcoal both suit it.

The temptation is to render the whole building in detail, which is exactly what fabric can't hold:
below a certain line weight, fine architectural cross-hatching just fills in and goes muddy. Keep the
structural lines confident and evenly weighted, keep the labels large enough to survive at chest
scale, and let the one amber floor carry the only warm colour in the piece so it stays the eye's
first stop.

Two inks is enough — the cream line work and the single amber accent. A third colour dilutes the
one that matters.

## How do I get one made?

Describe the tower at [JustOG](/) — how many bands, what each floor is called, and where the one
lit window sits. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and
it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop).

Five floors, one label each, and a building that has already told you everything.