Mecha Robot Cartoon Figure — Sculpture, Robotics Plaza, Nagoya

Engineering companies commission very little art and, when they do, they tend to commission something about their own history. This one asked for the opposite: something that would look like the future their visitors expect to see.

The brief

A robot, about 2.4 m, at the head of the visitor route through the plaza. Cartoon, not industrial. The design team’s only firm instruction was that the robot must not look like any product the company makes.

Chibi construction

The proportions are deliberately wrong for a real machine: the head is about 30% of the total height and the legs are short and heavy. That combination is what makes a machine read as a character rather than as equipment, and it is the same construction we use on animals.

The detail vocabulary is where it earns its name. The body is divided into eighteen painted plates by recessed panel lines about 5 mm wide, all of them following the geometry of the underlying form rather than being drawn on. Bolted joints are modelled as real raised collars with four bolt heads each at the shoulders, elbows and knees. There is one antenna, rectangular, on the left side of the head, angled back at fifteen degrees.

The visor is a single wide horizontal band across the whole face, dark and reflective, with no eyes in it. It is the only element that makes the figure feel like it is looking at you.

Panel lines that are actually straight

Long straight lines on a curved shell are the hardest thing we make. Every panel line on this piece was scribed into the surface with a routed guide rather than masked and painted, so the line is a physical groove and the light defines it. Painting them on would have been faster and would have failed at three metres.

On the plaza

It stands at 2.4 m at the start of the visitor route, where it is visible from the road through the glass frontage. Visitors are photographed with it before they go in rather than after they come out, which means it is doing its job as a welcome rather than a summary.