50 21ST CENTURY

MUSEUM OF
CONTEMPORARY
ART
SANAA

Xavier Costa

SANAA, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan, 2004.*

The Companions to the History of Architecture, Volume IV, Twentieth-Century Architecture.

Edited by David Leatherbarrow and Alexander Eisenschmidt.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Kanazawa proposes a new paradigm in museum conception and design. Inscribed
in SANAA’s trajectory, this structure manages to reposition the art museum in
architectural culture, as it redefines its sense of space and materiality, its relation-
ship to the phenomena of exhibition and display, and its role in today’s society.
In the modern era, the newly conceived institution of the museum offered a spe-
cial opportunity for architects and urban designers to shape the spaces containing
and representing art and history. Originating as public institutions during the years
of the French Revolution, modern museums started by collecting and displaying
past artifacts, and thus became a designed incarnation of history. In this role of
securing a space to facilitate the encounter between citizens, the arts, and the past,
the museum turned out to be a most essential public building in the new expansions
of Western capital cities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Designs
like Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin, completed in 1830, fully
expressed the monumental quality of these new, secular cathedrals of art. The mag-
nificence and grandiosity of museums grew over the decades, and even in the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century, museum designs such as Mies van der Rohe’s
National Gallery in Berlin, built in 1968, would redefine the overwhelmingly large,
empty hall as the main space for the museum, conferring a quasi-religious solemnity
to a program otherwise based in displaying small-sized artifacts. Later museum pro-
jects have tended to break from the grandiosity and monumentality of their prede-
cessors, seeking new references. A case in point is that of the Georges Pompidou
Center in Paris, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers in the 1970s, which
equates the space for art to industrial and temporary structures.
This progressive inquiry into museum designs that would relate to other, new
references cannot be dissociated from the exploration that contemporary art has
undertaken on the conditions of display and public presentation of the artwork.
The museum also embodies a model of civic membership, of social identification,
and engagement in the presentation of artifacts. In this sense, SANAA’s different
designs for museums during the past two decades significantly contribute to this
process undertaken since the mid-twentieth century. Their galleries and art centers
reduce their material presence to a complex interplay of containers, glass or reflect-
ing surfaces, and a pervasive use of light tectonics that let them substantially depart
from the monumental tradition in museography.
One could argue, with the museology scholar, Jean-Louis Déotte, that the phe-
nomenon of a universal process of “museification” of all sorts of sites and artifacts in
contemporary culture detracts from the museum being the only repository of
meaningful objects. In this perspective, any object, built place, even natural envi-
ronment, or non-material cultural expression, may be “museified” – that is, virtu-
ally decontextualized to coincide with its own display.1 The former contents of the
museum, therefore, explode to take over a universal presence, and the museum-
container inevitably remains as a much more profane structure.
Yet museum programs posed the challenge of providing magnificence to a large
collection that may suggest a repetitive series of galleries, housing hundreds or
 21ST Century Museum of Contemporary Art 3

thousands of items. How architecture handles this programmatic need has consti-
tuted a key question in the evolution of museum design.

Glass

Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, founders and partners at SANAA, have
worked on a number of designs for museographic institutions for the past 20 years.
The most significant and realized designs include the N Museum in Wakayama,
Japan (1995–97), the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio
(2001–06), the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (2003–07), the
Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London (2009), the Teshima Art Museum in Japan,
and the Louvre-Lens in Lens, France, completed in 2012.
Among these designs, the Kanazawa museum may be considered their first
major realized commission, designed and built between 1999 and 2004. In this case,
there was a close collaboration between the architects and the art director of the
institution, Yuko Hasegawa. Hasegawa wanted the museum to showcase recent
art, from 1980 onward, and at the same time to reflect the local, Kanazawa tradition
of pottery and craftwork, which has a smaller presence in the museum’s collection.
She coined the term “new flexibility” to refer to the spatial quality of the museum
as articulated through a large number of spaces of different size, instead of a few
large areas that could be partitioned in temporary ways.
This is a fresh concept in museographic design, and one that framed the resulting
decision of conceiving Kanazawa as a dense cluster of rooms. Any exhibition or
display would therefore need to be adapted to the sequence of rooms, which pro-
vide different conditions of volume, height, light, and so on. SANAA expressed that
this engagement of the museum’s director was crucial to the design process, and
was much appreciated by the architects. Indeed, Kazuyo Sejima pointed out during
an interview that new museums are too often designed before a museographic
project is in place. This programmatic vacuum translates into a tendency to overly
emphasize the need for flexibility in the architectural result, so that when the cura-
torial team would later start working on their project, the building would also need
to adapt to its spatial requirements. In Sejima’s words:

In Japan, the client usually requires that the architect create big exhibition spaces that
use movable walls, so we [SANAA and Hasegawa] decided against making two or
three big spaces and designed eighteen smaller spaces. The circulation is flexible,
so that she can arrange the exhibition spaces in different ways, according to the needs
of each show…This allows them to run separate, smaller shows simultaneously, or to
use the whole museum. It’s very different from the usual way of operating.2

The design started as a grouping of rectangular spaces of different sizes and

shapes, tightly clustered and held together by a circle in plan, a low cylinder that
4 The Present Generation

constitutes the limit and façade of the building. In volume, the 18 rooms emerge
over the level of the general rooftop with different heights, so that the complex
appears as a micro-city contained by a disc of glass.
SANAA’s other museum designs also conceive the entire building as a grouping
of independent volumes. The New Museum in New York City appears as an irreg-
ular stacking of containers that make the structure look like a casually piled-up
series of boxes. On the other hand, the Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion fol-
lows a spatial organization similar to Kanazawa, with a floor plan that contains
within a square 18 different spatial units – thus making the floor plan resemble
a complex yet neatly organized food tray. As a reference to the glass objects being
exhibited, all volumes are shaped with rounded edges, and this geometry allows for
a more fluid connection between the units.
As Ákos Moravánszky has noted, the frequent use by SANAA of curved glass
vertical surfaces, especially for display purposes, seems to refer back to Lilly Reich’s
designs in collaboration with Mies van der Rohe, especially for the 12 large curved
glass plates presented in the mining industry section for “Deutsches Volk, Deutsche
Arbeit,” the first propaganda exhibition after the Nazi takeover in Berlin, 1934.3
SANAA have used this way of display repeatedly, especially in the exhibit of their
own work in the Leon Museum of Art, as well as in their intervention in the Ger-
man Pavilion in Barcelona. Some existing techniques of ephemeral display, there-
fore, are incorporated into their permanent galleries. In this way, the museum
comes closer to the temporary condition of the display design and, architecturally
speaking, of the pavilion.
The “collection” of box-like volumes at Kazanawa results in a variety of naturally
lit spaces, ranging from the four open courtyards to the diverse galleries offering
different skylight solutions that combine with changing sizes and ceiling heights.
The repertoire of rooms should allow for any art exhibit to find the right space.

Photographs

SANAA’s interest in reflecting surfaces is a constant design element throughout

their work. Their first art gallery, the N Museum in Wakayama, consists of a sus-
pended, horizontal prism of glass that acts as a large-scale mirror in front of the city
and surrounding landscape. So as not to break the continuous reflecting surface, the
architectural design introduces a complex, rear ramp entrance that remains invis-
ible from the front of the building.
Sejima and Nishizawa pay a special attention to the photography of their archi-
tecture. Over time, they have selected a few photographers and have closely col-
laborated with them toward certain results. A common effect in the photography of
SANAA’s spaces is an intense white light that powerfully bleaches all interiors. The
qualities of their spaces reside in the transparency of surfaces, an augmented pres-
ence of natural light, and the ubiquitous location of white planes that maximize the
lightness of their spaces. Structure, on the other hand, is often minimized or even
 21ST Century Museum of Contemporary Art 5

made invisible. An interesting precedent is their proposal for the new Campus Cen-
ter for the Illinois Institute of Technology (1997–98):

We selected a very small, thin column and very thick glass for the partitions. We
wanted to study an idea of reducing the usual hierarchy between structure and par-
tition, where the structure comes first and partitions are infill. So we tried to make
the structure disappear and the partitions very thick and heavy.4

In Kazanawa, SANAA chose to introduce a series of extremely slender columns

on the façade. The photographers selected to work on the Kazanawa museum were
Walter Niedermayr, Luisa Lambri, and Takashi Homma. Their work was dis-
played and published at the time of the opening of the museum. Niedermayr pro-
duced interior and exterior images with a strong, bleached white light that lets
certain colored objects – furniture, visitors, some art work, greenery – stand out
in a white space with few references. Luisa Lambri focused on a few windows
and doors, where the images reflected on the glass surface translate into a different
color distortion that brings them close to the white of the building surfaces. With a
different approach, Takashi Homma focused on recording the construction proc-
ess, with images that show the snowed, white surface of the construction site
before it was broken in, then the layering of horizontal surfaces and materials, from
concrete to the layers of insulation and paving, to end with a snowed, white over-
view of the building that connects with the initial photograph of the site.

Pavilions
In two recent temporary installations in London and Barcelona, SANAA designed
structures that were based on producing a reflecting effect on the surrounding
spaces, echoing the previous experiences in Kanazawa and other art centers. These
two installations shared the common architectural theme of the pavilion, whether
it was about inscribing a temporary element in a temporary pavilion, or creating a
new one that would mirror the Serpentine Gallery as a pavilion-like structure in
Kensington Gardens.
The pavilion, with a name that derives from the Latin papilio, or butterfly, con-
tains the sense of ephemerality in space. Its originary use in landscape design cap-
tured the transitory character of its use, briefly along an itinerary. The pavilion is
based on lightness, as well as on an architecture conceived in visual terms, as con-
stituting part of a visual parallax, of offering and framing a point of vision, a per-
spective, in an open landscape.
At the German Pavilion in Barcelona, designed by Mies van der Rohe, SANAA
introduced a free-standing acrylic curtain spiraling and defining an interior space
within the glass volume of the pavilion itself. The transparent acrylic surface
was positioned facing the main glass façade of the building, thus engaging in a rich
interplay of reflections, since the plastic surface was a curved one. The curtain acted
6 The Present Generation

as a mirror that reflected the already reflecting surfaces of glass, marble, and stain-
less steel.
The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion was a light, open structure that provided a
reflecting ceiling made of polished aluminum, a horizontal mirror suspended
above the heads of the visitors, reflecting the green surface of Kensington Gardens –
and the blue of the sky on its upper surface. One cannot avoid thinking of the hor-
izontal mirroring effects of Mies’ pavilion, with its still pools of water, and the many
symmetries between horizontal surfaces.5

Mirrors

Returning to the museum designs, the Toledo Glass Pavilion creates a transparent
labyrinth made of rounded glass rooms wrapped in two separate layers of glass,
setting up a contrasting effect between the galleries and the fluid interstitial spaces
that separate them. Here, as in other SANAA designs for displays, the transparent
surface is acting as a curtain that sometimes wraps the visitors, sometimes the
exhibited objects. In their own renderings of the architectural designs, SANAA
strongly emphasize the reflected images, which often tend to mirror the surround-
ing landscape. In the case of the Louvre-Lens, the exterior views strongly represent
the mirrored landscape, to the extent of making the building disappear. This is a
gesture that reminds us of Dan Graham’s series of pavilions, small-scale outdoor
constructions positioned in the middle of landscapes, mostly made of glass and one-
way mirror surfaces. Therefore, they dissolve in their environment, becoming mul-
tipliers of their context. Graham’s pavilions act as devices that visually interfere and
disappear in their locations. These pavilions provide a frame for their users to vis-
ualize the surrounding landscapes. This visualization takes place through a thin,
almost immaterial layer that defines an interior space from an exterior one – some-
times with degrees of ambiguity. Graham’s structures often may be termed as a
“minimal presence,” a purely visualizing device with an extremely light structure
that is sufficient to support it.
Dan Graham’s and Mies van der Rohe’s pavilions have a strong presence in
SANAA’s design through the use of reflecting surfaces, of mirroring volumes.
Regarding Kanazawa, Sejima stated that the choice of a circular plan and a circular
façade was a way to erase its monumental presence: “Avoiding a main entrance
makes it less monumental, less of a building. It can dissolve into the surround-
ings.”6 Asked about the concept of pavilions, and how it exists in Japanese culture,
Kazuyo Sejima responded that “small kiosks within nature exist historically in
Japan, but also in Europe,” and that “dissolving the edge of interior space is some-
thing we are interested in, in our own work. It is easier to realize this in pavilion
design than in most other building types, so we really enjoy it.”7
Museums tend to be structures highly charged with a public, representational
role. The cathedrals of the modern world, as they have been termed, museums
 21ST Century Museum of Contemporary Art 7

offer an opportunity to architecture to display its most symbolic and often monu-
mental face. SANAA, through their many museum designs, have avoided any form
of monumentality and have approximated their museum designs to the pavilion
type, which necessarily refers to concepts of ephemerality, visual and narrative
dependence on its surrounding landscapes, even a playful or recreational use. Pavi-
lions are not dwellings; they are just temporarily inhabited kiosks that punctuate a
much larger itinerary.
SANAA’s design decisions and their fortune in our society are also revealing
about the changing nature of museums, and by extension, of public structures.
As museographic institutions have become less the cenotaphs of massive archeo-
logical collections and more the transitional spaces where art is temporarily dis-
played, their architecture needs to express this change. An interesting reference
is Jean Nouvel’s design for an art center, the Foundation Cartier in Paris. One
of its main design decisions was to create a free-standing glass façade toward the
street, whereas the building stands at a distance behind this surface of glass. It evi-
denced that the logic of display as we know it through shop windows and art cases
was extended to the entire structure, similarly “displayed” to the whole city.
The pavilion may be seen emerging as the new type for public architecture, par-
ticularly for museums and exhibition centers. In Kanazawa, we do not find a highly
hierarchized architecture, but rather what seems to be a randomly put together
archipelago of box-like galleries – a perfect circle embraces and frames a clutter
of diverse, seemingly unrelated spaces. Its plan reminds us of a concentration of
different-sized paintings on a gallery wall, or an accumulation of items as shown
in collections, holdings, displays. From John Soane’s house-museum to Christian
Boltanski’s accumulations of portraits and historical evidences, collecting may
be portrayed in the sheer piling of materials. The Kanazawa museum similarly reg-
isters and articulates a resonance between its condition as a collection and its many
spaces as an accidental grouping of different galleries.

Notes

* Image credit: © SANAA.

1. Jean-Louis Déotte, Le musée, l’origine de l’esthetique (Paris: Harmatann, 1993).
2. Hans Ulrich Obrist, The Conversation Series: SANAA Kazuyo Sejima & Ryue Nishizawa
(Cologne: Walter Koenig, 2012), 17.
3. Ákos Moravánszky, “Mies-en-scène,” in SANAA: Intervention in the Mies van der Rohe
Pavilion, ed. Xavier Costa (Barcelona: ACTAR, 2010).
4. Alejandro Zaera Polo with Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, A Conversation, in
SANAA Sejima Nishizawa 1983–2004 (Madrid: El Croquis 2007), 18.
5. Robin Evans, “Mies van der Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries,” in Translations from
Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association, 2005).
6. Obrist, The Conversation Series.
7. Obrist, The Conversation Series, 65–66.
8 The Present Generation

Bibliography

Déotte, Jean-Louis. Le musée, l’origine de l’esthetique. Paris: Harmatann, 1993.

Evans, Robin. “Mies van der Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries.” In Translations from Drawing
to Building and Other Essays. London: Architectural Association, 2005.
Moravánszky, Ákos. “Mies-en-scène.” In SANAA: Intervention in the Mies van der Rohe
Pavilion, edited by Xavier Costa. Barcelona: ACTAR, 2010.
Obrist, Hans Ulrich. The Conversation Series: SANAA Kazuyo Sejima & Ryue Nishizawa.
Cologne: Walter Koenig, 2012.
Polo, Alejandro Zaera, with Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. A Conversation. In SANAA
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