21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

i recently had the chance to visit the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, by Pritzker Prize winner SANAA.  It's an interesting building for what it says both about modern art and Japanese architecture and culture.

The building is a circle in plan, meaning there is no facade in the traditional sense; it has an insistent neutrality being not only singular in form but also in material, here glass.  The glass perimeter has within it many rectangular volumes and one circular volume, varying in size and materiality, as some are voids and some solids.  Within these volumes are exhibition spaces, again either closed (opaque volumes) or open (as courtyards).  The building is roughly split in two, with the public free to enter the northern part of the building, the southern half is paid special exhibition.  The line between the two seems ambiguous and wandering in a way that leads to the belief that it's not a serious demarkation, just as one might understand the glass perimeter to be but a formality of separation between inside and outside, as you can see from the picture above.  With no line between free public and paid, one has the sense that the space is a free one to wander, until you come upon a rope barrier where it's made clear whether you paid or not.

Site Plan

Floor Plan

The notion of breaking down the barrier between inside and out is an ancient one with a strong presence in traditional Japanese architecture.  Exterior walls were often sliding screens (shoji) that when opened loosened the barrier between house and garden, just as the gate or opening in a wall one would often find between garden and the wilder landscape beyond.  The idea was not to dissolve the differences between the two, but that the differences be celebrated as a matter of design.  One was always understood as a rooted version of the other, not its replacement.  Similarly, in the SANAA plan, one understands the interior as a version of the larger city, minus all the warts and condensers and utility wires of the modern Japanese city beyond.  Present too is the Japanese characteristic of absent center, here playfully missing from the most insistent of forms, a circle. In an earlier post, we talked about that characteristic of the Japanese city and how the train station pretended as such but did so as center that expelled as much as it gathered, acting as a kind of anti-center.  This museum, with it's open stance with regard to access, does much the same, as people move about freely, coming and going, paying and not paying, 

Public corridor on north side cuts all the way through

As abstract as a red circle is for a nation of many islands, so the 21st Century Museum is as a building for the arts.  The entrance is a poke in the glass with a small canopy overhead, and the public entrance on the west side equally ambivalent about its role as portal to the glass circle.  The building does nothing to acknowledge the powerful sun that burns one side or another, and the shades that have been installed to mitigate that sun are an insult to the purity of the initial gesture; they're thin and must be pulled down one by one, and each is pulled differently, creating a chaotic appearance in a building with no tolerance for such.  It's also an affront to the ingenuity of traditional Japanese architecture, which was so attuned to the seasons and light. 

Late day sun can be blinding

The glass is often mirror

We architects like to assume that glass is transparent, but know that it often acts like a mirror.  The 21st Century Museum, like Japanese culture in general, moves as effortlessly from blinding light to shadow as it does transparent glass to mirror, and so the museum exists almost as much as it doesn't exist.  It's an enigma that plays with it's position between the precious Kenroku-en garden and Kanazawa Castle, where a wood house sits on a stone in a relationship equal to that of the garden and the landscape that preceded it.  At times it blurs as much the boundary between the sacred and profane as it does the boundary between inside and out.  At other times of the day, or the other "side" of the museum at the same time of day, it insists on this boundary by mirroring the city you're arriving from, making it's presence known from without.  In a similar "knowing from without", the island nation came to know itself as the Land of the Rising Sun, a reference to its perception from afar.

Permanent art installation Swimming Pool by Leandro Erlich

The light and the dark

Rolex Learning Center

Architects SANAA have received a lot of attention lately, especially after having won the Pritzger Prize.  i find this project, the Rolex Learning Center, to be an interesting one.

Funimag photoblog

archiCentral

The program is for a learning center for the Ecole Polytechnique in Lauzanne, Switzerland, which includes a library, auditorium, conference spaces, large forum, cafe, and restaurant.

The undulating form is a perversion of bumpy Switzerland, the building sitting as it does on a flat site near the lake, yet offering hills and dales in a floor that rises and falls, seemingly without reason except to create interesting effect.  Apparently the undulating floor and courtyards are used as devices to differentiate the space functions without having to resort to walls, which are practically non existent.  This has the effect of creating a curious situation where site and building have been inverted; the site providing a neutral space amenable to human occupation, the building rolling up and down as if in need of earth graders to provide a suitable surface.  The building is essentially undifferentiated in thickness, existing in the abstract as if a strata or membrane, but with no walls it reads as composed of 2 layers, with some form of medium (meaning?) that makes their separation impossible.  The pairing of inseparable membranes, acting as a datum of sorts, with the random undulation of the membrane has an interesting parallel in plan, where the random placement and size of the courts is put in stark contrast to the rigidity of the building perimeter, and recalls an inversion of the French Hotel plan type where an interior order is created within an undifferentiated, random perimeter.

This curious allegiance between the rational and the irrational, carried through in both plan and elevation/section, provides a table of sorts that should be the basis for higher education,  embodying here an institution of higher learning, and seeming every bit as abstract as "learning center".

dezeen

i first wished the underside of the slab weren't so pristine, though came to realize that this reinforces the abstractness of the thing.  i first thought this building was for Rolex, and so was interested in how the treatment of the underside as a grotto might create a metaphor for the passing of time, but it turns out Rolex only provided funding; they have no other connection to the building.