DISC: ISSUE 2

“Intimacy”: Facing Wheels

Status: Published
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Facing Wheels examines the car as architectural sign, staging a confrontation between two modifications of the same stock vehicle — the 1991 Caprice scraper culture of Oakland, CA and the police cruiser — as parallel expressions of power, intimacy, and spatial control. Drawing on Dr. Darell Fields's reading of Adolf Loos's House for Josephine Baker as a "Black architectural type," VERS extends the inquiry from building to object, asking how blackness, surveillance, and identity inscribe themselves into designed surfaces beyond architecture's disciplinary borders. The essay centers on an installation: a one-way mirror composed from a scraper rim and a police rim, embedded flush into a wall, that literalizes the dialectic. One face reflects the self back to the viewer in an act of domestic intimacy; the other permits unseen observation, evoking the voyeuristic logic Fields locates in Loos. By concealing the tectonic relationship between the two rims, the piece refuses resolution, holding open the tension between expression and enforcement, personalization and panopticon.