Nakatomi Space

September 30, 2025

The other day I was wandering around the remnants of the Merina textile and wool factory, a massive complex that grew and grew over decades only to suddenly be dismantled in favour of a shopping plaza and car park wrapping around a decayed, collapsing, concrete corpse housing a few unhoused, garbage piles, and the odd transient artist. Merina’s rotten body exposed its private innards; a few holes and gaps to peek into forbidden zones to imagine its secret histories buried deep inside. As I walked over that ground, I couldn’t help but imagine: there’s the Merina we see, but what about the other Merina, a parallel factory city hidden by expulsion, decay, collapse, ruination, and private investment? What’s between those walls, below that surface, within the last remaining chimney stack, or submerged in the abandoned water pools?

Moving through the city is a form of two-layered walking: every step you take aboveground is mirrored by a second step below ground. On the surface, we move through architectural space that is visible, meant to be occupied and inhabited, yet all architecture has an other universe that we are not privy to: the guts that keep those visible layers functioning, agglomerations of conduit, pipes, shafts, culverts, data centres, mechanical floors, fire stairs. This is a hidden anatomy, and we are not privy to such visibility. How might it be possible to breech this world for that world, to see equally what’s hidden and what’s on display, to slither through the cracks and experience the infrastructures that sustain these buildings and environments; to join — literally — the dark side of architecture?

Infrastructural cross-section of Manhattan, AIA, 1965.

To answer that, we first need to inhabit the body and mind of a New York cop on Christmas vacation who accidentally gets caught in the yuppie smugness of 1980s Los Angeles: that’s right, let’s become John McClane: reluctant, motherfucker-ing anti-hero of that classic film, Die Hard. Consider McClane as not an action-hero, but a brilliant improvisor who shifts his mode of perception. He teaches us, on the one hand, to ‘see differently,’ by opening up imaginative access to what’s usually occluded, while on the other, he reveals architecture’s material reality: its sewers, crawlspaces, elevator shafts, machine rooms and maintenance corridors as catalysts for desperate improvisation.

Yippee-kay-yay…

So, now kitted out in my (imagined) tank top and bare feet, I can traverse Trenčín and re-conceive its myriad of hidden passages, neglected sites, and forbidden, off-world zones through the lens of what one of my favourite writers, Geoff Manaugh , calls “ Nakatomi space.” This, according to Manaugh, is what happens when you treat architecture not as a finished form, but an accessible volume of voids and organs. What would it mean, then, to move through Merina and other local sites as if every building and every site in Trenčín has two architectures: the official, designed one, but also the parallel, latent one that only reveals itself when people move through it unconventionally? Nakatomi space, in connection to two-layered walking, is a method to reveal the everyday, above-ground city and its improvised, or infrastructural shadow, below.

Nakatomi Plaza, Century City, Los Angeles.

This, of course, is just another, deviant way of positioning the Bureau of Operational Landscapes . In this formulation, an operational landscape always contains a dual layer: there is the visible, civic, and ‘official;’ while the hidden layer is its operational cousin, the ‘unofficial’ that sustains such environments but is largely invisible, relegated to a shadow state and ostensibly ignored. What I have always strived to do with the Bureauis to devise ways to enable citizenry to occupy these parallel worlds through various actions: walking, photography, or narrative and to ‘re-see’ the double city.

Going back to Die Hard, and Manaugh’s insight of Nakatomi space, there is this cosmic balance between the intentions of the visible city with its other, and, to me, more thrilling version: the double city where there are ‘public’ surfaces that we all recognize, and the ‘backstage’ that actually sustains everything. This hidden layer of access, voids, and organs can be activated and breached, and with it, it presents a version of the city that is a lot more messier, complex, and riveting.

I am walking back to where I am staying, and all around me I can now see hundreds of Nakatomi’s in Trenčín: a double city of light and shadow, façade and organ, surface and void. I choose to ignore my usual fixed paths. Instead, I create my own worm-like route through the city. It is now porous and provisional, a city of movement rather than enclosed.