NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WESTERN ART
Like a married couple sit across the dinner table sharing the day’s events, two edifices by architects which helped shaped the built form of modern metropolitan Japan, sit across the street. Mirroring each other they seem to possess no similarities in any way shape or form however intrinsically linked through time and place of a zeitgeist which lasted decades.
Japan owes much of its modern architecture style to European influence, and in-particular to illustrious Swiss born French architect Le Corbusier. The National Museum of Western Art (NMWA) of 1959, designed by Le Corbusier not long before his passing, is a relic of Architecture modernism and of great importance to Japan’s modern architecture history. Highlighting its European heritage is the juxtaposing building, Tokyo Bunka Kaikan by architect Kunio Maekawa, constructed in 1961. A superstructure in comparison one questions the fact that Maekawa once worked for Corbusier as there seems to be little other than concrete in common. Upon further investigation of Maekawa’s work and especially once inside you can see the stark attempt to equally fuse both cultures into the one building. It was incredible, a perplexing construct of stylistic assimilation yet which appears involuntary as both styles compete for center stage.
Placed within Ueno Park in Tokyo, the NMWA sits among the greenery and cherry blossoming trees. The colours of this are reflected in the edifice and the garden resonates within a courtyard backdropped with glazed green ceramic tiles, inaccessible to the public but truly beautiful to observe while sipping tea in the gallery café.
Entering the main gallery is bright and spacious, a large triangular skylight pours rays upon the bronze sculptures, I think of the ancient Greco Roman key of the divine. A scenographic walkway to the next floor pressed up against the back wall animates the foreground with playfulness. One enters the first floor with surprise, the ceilings are very low in comparison, a clear way to compensate for the heights below and to maintain that Le Corbusier calling card of a low set public building. Yet although sacrifices have been made, compensation has been paid to the first floor though mezzanine views back down to the ground, where once again the light can be seen and felt.
Stairwells are locked and barricaded in glass, a shame as both aspects would not have been Le Corbusier’s choice, peering at them with curiosity I wonder; will that be the remedy he was intending for his user’s sudden feel of being sandwiched between floor plates. Leaving the Edifice, I am faced with its influence on Japan, I wonder if others see this and feel this as I do.
I respect the delicateness of Le Corbusier’s placement of this Edifice. Acknowledging the context of its surroundings he treats the unbuilt form with equal importance to the built. Maekawa uses the whole footprint of its site, I find this strange as it is common in Japanese vernacular to blur the boundary between interior and exterior evident in many traditional buildings and that of Le Corbusier’s work. In that I feel that Le Corbusier in all his originality still felt more Japanese than Maekawa perhaps exhibiting talent over learned experience.
Tokyo Bunka Kaikan
