This might also describe the exhibition of Chiba's work currently being held at Gallery MA in Tokyo. Spotlights illuminate surgically precise models of seven projects distributed throughout darkened gallery spaces. Shown at scales of 1:100 or 1:10, they are all crisp monochrome volumes (with the exception of the Japan Guide Dog Center, which has been modeled with more or less accurate colors and surface finishes). A large model of the Gotenyama Project sits in a corner of the outdoor courtyard, while the upper level of the gallery is filled with a miniature forest of white-painted real trees as the setting for the Villa in Yatsugatake. Elements such as parapets and flashings may be absent, but the abstraction of all these models is in fact not so different from the real buildings. Chiba's architecture tends toward sharp-edged, flat-roofed rectilinear volumes without extraneous details. The asymmetric voids, balconies and courtyards contained within the simple building forms are echoed by complementary arrays of yard spaces that articulate their layout on the site.

Indeed, Chiba's approach is as much focused on the configuration of volumes within the site as it is on the composition of spaces within the building. Avoiding the standard, rationalized solutions imposed by Tokyo's severe congestion and strict building regulations, Chiba searches for alternative ways of subdividing land. His underlying intention is to produce site-specific architecture through the discovery of spatial and volumetric configurations implied by each context, accepting all the existing conditions as a "topography" to which the design must adapt. In this exhibition, his emphasis on engaging with contextual givens is symbolized by notching the site model of the Shichirigahama Project into an existing stone sculpture in the Gallery MA courtyard.

Chiba calls the diagram he extracts from a given site a keishiki (format), although he prefers to translate this into English as a "rule" -- hence the exhibition title, "Rule of the Site." He makes an analogy with sports such as baseball: their rules may be completely arbitrary, but success relies on a delicate internal balance. Exemplified by the meandering circulation route of the Japan Guide Dog Center or the checkerboard of solids and voids in the Platform apartment building, these intuited rules are then translated into lucid architectural solutions.

Chiba's method of producing architecture could be described as analysis as much as "design," yet it's never fully scientific, nor are the rules that result entirely logical. An arbitrary leap must occur somewhere in the design process, but he says that he can never recall when and where it happens. The paradox of Chiba's approach is that he wants the site-specific rule of a particular project to have the potential to then be used elsewhere -- deterritorialized diagrams applicable to sites and programs unrelated to their origins. It's a promising approach, one that straddles the boundary between specific and generic, eschewing a unique signature yet transcending standard solutions.