DESA1002 'Continuous City' Nicholas Boey

Abstract

Traditional Japanese art, an important part of the country’s millennia spanning history and culture, is seeing its foothold in modernity being rapidly eroded by the relentless push of technology, progression and new social and artistic issues. However it will always its place as a formative element of the country, and the Tokyo Museum of Art quite literally cements it into the centre of metropolitan Tokyo. A monolithic concrete wall encloses the narrow and long site, located between a river and a busy street. It disguises the building materially in its surroundings but is nonetheless extroversive in its monumentality. Its only entrance, a dark and narrow diversion of the busy foot traffic, uses traditional Japanese design principles in its treatment of space as a sequence of experiences, leveraging each experience against the next. The foyer is the antithesis of the entrance. A double height room lit by a floor to ceiling glass curtain wall, it is bounded on both ends by sloping walls that expand the space towards the ceiling in direct contrast to the earlier enclosure. Large, open exhibition space makes up the majority of the museum, separated into discrete areas by the same sloping walls in the foyer. Vertical circulation is achieved by staircases enclosed in red glass, cantilevered over the river as a suspension of the museum into the inescapable urbanity of Tokyo. The traditions of Japan are upheld by the use of timber in the building. Columns reminiscent of Imperial architecture support the glass wall while rooms constructed with joinery make up some of the exhibition space, but both never wholly escape the temporal context: the columns are pierced with steel joints and the rooms are hung from the ceiling with steel. The Tokyo Museum of Art attempts to unify the traditions of the past with current societal and aesthetic values by forming a relationship between the art of the Japanese culture and the people of the Tokyo community.