[ Part I ]

[ Part II ]

[ Part III ]

A non-exhaustive reference list for works by Hiroshi Nakao, including Black Maria:

(2004)10×10, Haig Beck & Jackie Cooper ed. (Black Maria, Bird Cage)

(2001) XS: Big Ideas, Small Buildings, Phyllis Richardson ed. (Black Maria, Gisant/Transi)

(2001) Lotus. n111, 2001 (Black Maria, Observation Tower, Dark Box Bird Cage)

(2001) Detail. v41, n8 (Dec), pp1496-98 (Black Maria)

(2000) quaderns. n226 (Jul), pp56-65 (‘Creating a Hollow’; ‘Not to be at Home’)

(1999) GA Houses. n59 (Feb), pp144-145 (House with Gallery)

(1997) ume. n5, pp16-23 (Dark Box Bird Cage)

(1997) AA Files. n33 (Summer), pp72-76 (Dark House Bird Cage, Studio for Flower Artist)

(1997) Domus. n794 (Jun), pp18-25 (Studio for Flower Artist)

(1996) Japan Architect. n24 (Winter), pp210-213 (House for Flower Artist)

(1995) GA Japan Environmental Design. n17 (Nov-Dec), pp94-96 (Summer House)

(1995) GA Houses. n47 (Oct), pp68-73 (Dark Box Bird Cage)

(1995) World Architecture. n32, pp88-93: (‘Second Trend in Japanes Architecture; Poetics of HN’)

(1995) GA Houses. n45 (Mar), pp150-151 (Penthouse, Black Maria)

(1993) Architecture d’aujourd’hui. n289 (Oct), pp74-79 (Dark Box Bird Cage)

(1993) Japan Architect. n9 (Spring), pp228-229 (Dark Box Bird Cage)

(1993) Japan Architect. n11 (Autumn), pp194-203 (‘Black Indoors White Yard’)

(1993) Space Design. n5(344) (May), pp88-89, (‘Report on Ando Exhibit’)

(1992) Japan Architect. n6 (Spring), pp38-53, (‘Creating hollows’, Chairs for a Photographer, Dark Box Bird Cage)

[ Part I ]

[ Part II ]

[ Refs. ]

Black Maria’s failure to hold a single likeness is paralleled by its failure to contain space in any regular way. When Black Maria is closed, it forms a deep narrowing hollow. Space is trapped in the dark angle. When it is slowly opened, a bright sliver bisects the space at it deepest, most concentrated point. The new angle, as it opens, forms a space at the opposite end, close to the hinge; but before it can form properly, the hinge, which is offset from the open face, causes that angle too to come apart and the space to escape. The deepest, most intense interiority that Black Maria is capable of producing is also the moment at which that interiority is closest to incisive failure. Nakao describes the space as turning in on itself “like a glove turned inside out”. As a container for cartesian space, Black Maria is entirely unsatisfactory. The movement produced by its articulation about the hinge causes space to slip in and out, to flicker irregularly. “A folding screen. Not the conventional folding screen that distributes spaces, but one that sucks space inward, or rather, inspires space and expires it.”  Black Maria doesn’t contain space; rather it ‘spaces’. It projects space, articulates it, inhales and exhales it. It makes spaces between itself, within its angles. The emphasis here is placed on how Black Maria spaces rather than what space it contains. In order to inquire of Black Maria (as if it were an oracle), we need to consider its operation rather than its identity.

These two parallel failures: the failure to hold a stable likeness and the failure to contain a stable space, are not incidental. Black Maria spaces as it signifies: by means of an angle which traps. It creates angles in which space pools or is wedged. This angle, which manifests in Black Maria as a cut which severs, or a mouth which opens introduces an interval into the object.

It is not enough to say that Black Maria is simply continuously variable, in an isotropic way; as if all degrees of movement, all adjustments, all positionings, are precisely equal in value. Black Maria works strongly against this idea of isotropic variability. At certain positions, locations, configurations, significance is trapped for a moment in the angle; a little further and this significance leaks away: Look, a shark! No, wait, where did it go? Likeness only appear when, for a brief instant, the configuration attains a likeness and signifies.

The uncertainty that this produces in the person who encounters Black Maria, and registers the momentary likenesses (as I am suggesting people cannot help but do) is part of the effect of Black Maria. Black Maria does not simply and solely operate in the domain of form (if it is ever possible for architecture to reserve itself in that way). Its primary register is in the domain of the affect on the encounterer.

What does Black Maria do? It fails. Or rather, it refuses to succeed. It fails to signify a wolf in a stable way. Such signification would be possible: a statue of what a wolf looks like would suffice. But Nakao refuses this stability. Similarly, it would be possible to make some modifications to Black Maria in order to make it space in a stable way. But Nakao refuses this stability, too. The locus of both the refusal-to-be-like and the likeness itself, as well as the refusal-to-space and the spacing itself in Black Maria is the hinge.

[ Part I ]

The flickering of likeness produced by Black Maria is connected to its mobility. It does not retain a single, clearly marked likeness, because of its capacity for transformation. There are three forms of mobility which we must notice in order to understand Black Maria‘s instability and variability.

The first is the mobility of the viewer. This is common to spatial works. The viewer is not fixed in place, as is predominantly the case with pictures. This is why architecture posseses a greater degree of variability than a picture. The viewer is able to vary range and angle from the object, changing its relationship to the background, and adjusting how it is percieved: from prison wagon to wolf and on to something else.

Black Maria, however, has a capacity for transformation even when the viewer remains stationary. It has positional variability. Something that rides on wheels is not sited somewhere, it is parked. Although it sits in a Japanese park this morning, this afternoon you might find it around the corner on your way to work, or in the trees on the way to Grandma’s house. Black Maria is not positionally stable. It can be taken somewhere else and reparked. In this way the  figure-ground relationship can be modified, and the likeness correspondingly: would Black Maria be a wolf if it was not for the forest it sits in?

The third form of mobility in Black Maria is its reconfigurability. This is the mobility of the hinge. The hinge produces variability. However, it also produces constraint. Various likenesses can be produced as Black Maria is reconfigured; but the relationship between the two parts is fixed. The two parts cannot be stacked one on top of the other; nor can they be placed at a distance from one another. Their relaltionship is fixed – parameterised – by the hinge. There is a radius of possible positions for each part. The hinge separates and joins. It is an interval at the centre of Black Maria; the point on which it turns. It is where the transformation of likeness is not entirely in the hands of the viewer.

The deconstructive concept of free play has been badly understood by some to mean (false and yet somehow a truism) that anything can mean anything. If it were possible to conceive of a variability without constraint, likeness would become so generalised as to lose the ability to signify. Umberto Eco writes, “A similarity or an analogy, whatever its epistemological status, is important if it is exceptional, at least under a certain description. An analogy between Achilles and a clock based on the fact that both are physical objects is of no interest whatsoever” (Interpretation and Overinterpretation, 1992, 63).

Equally important for the play of significance in Black Maria is that it fails. It fails to hold a single consistent likeness, without having the good manners to refrain from any likeness at all. It does not fail to correspond; but it fails to correspond in a stable way.

[ Part III ]

[ Refs. ]

It is part of the internal necessity of Hiroshi Nakao’s Black Maria (1994) that it is likened to something. It is like a dancer’s legs, a severed brushstroke, a wolf, a paddy wagon. One half of Black Maria tapers, the other bifurcates. When the two halves are folded together they form a maw with fishbones stuck vertically, a basking shark on wheels grazing in a Japanese park, through the gills of which it is possible to slip out. When the two halves are spread, it is an elongated splinter, a shallow stage, two carriages of a train.

None of these likenesses are preserved for long. They flicker and appear, sometimes simultaneously, and then they slip quietly away in favour of another. Likeness is an often-derided architectural mechanism. It is a well-rehearsed method of critical derogation to liken an unfavoured work to something facetious. Likeness is taken to indicate shallowness. Equally, likeness is sometimes considered to be a weak form of criticism. A weak critic can do no more than say this is like that. Likeness might even be shameful.

Black Maria could be seen as a mechanism for producing likenesses. A likeness is not a representation in the simple sense. Not all representations are likenesses (the word ‘dog’ does not need to be like a dog in any way to represent a dog) Nor are all likenesses representations. Incidental likenesses are possible (Black Maria does not represent a basking shark, but it is like one in certain ways). Likeness opens the philosophical problem of correspondence. When we say something corresponds, are we identifying an objective relationship, or merely observing something about our own correspondence-finding mechanisms? The later Wittgenstein argues that correspondence is just another rule in a language-game. Others have argued that correspondence is a basic principle of logic (certainly symbolic logic). To account for likeness, we need to expand our view of architecture as a representational system beyond a simple one-to-one correspondence (a naive theory of picturing or signifying).

In Black Maria, likeness flickers. But how does it produce this flickering? Is it simply that it is given to us as an ‘exhibit’ and we understand that exhibits are meant to be read like this? Is it the fact that Black Maria is exhibited in a particular way that prompts the flickering of likenesses? Possibly. Probably. But for a little, I want to speak for the idea that the work is somehow constructed in such a way as to produce this flickering.

[ Part II ]

[ Part III ]

[ Refs. ]