The Mizuta Museum of Art is a 7,000sf building on a university campus in Japan designed to show works from a valuable collection of Ukiyo-e (Japanese woodcuts), while also being able to accommodate contemporary works and artistic production from the school and community. The fragile nature of these prints requires a highly controlled and insulated ... read more

The Mizuta Museum of Art is a 7,000sf building on a university campus in Japan designed to show works from a valuable collection of Ukiyo-e (Japanese woodcuts), while also being able to accommodate contemporary works and artistic production from the school and community. The fragile nature of these prints requires a highly controlled and insulated environment. As the building closest to the campus entry, it also acts as a gateway building, providing information and displays about campus life. Finally, its compressed but exposed site with seventeen existing tress and nine meter height limit could only yield a two story building with a dual programmatic role, museum and orientation center, each requiring direct access to the main campus walk.

To give both floors equal access to the pedestrian route, the building is excavated a half level into the site, with one ramp leading up to the two museum galleries and another leading down to a campus information center. These ramps are dimensioned for loading as well as entry, thus eliminating the need for a freight elevator. In conjunction with the mechanical space at the east entry and an overlook lounge at the west end, the space of the ramp creates a perimeter environmental buffer that protects the exterior side of the gallery walls from direct sunlight.

 “Ukiyo-e” translates into “Pictures of the Floating World” as the prints often depicted famous actors, courtesans, or travel scenes meant to lift the viewer from the daily routine of his/her life. We were taken by this notion, which was architecturally translated into the floating tectonic of the cast-in-place structure that cradle the galleries over the information spaces. Additionally, the slots of light created by the façade that recall the graphic method of depicting rain found in many of the prints.

L-shaped pre-cast concrete pieces line the building ramps and form a continuous vertical and horizontal shelter. These pieces clip onto the roof of the cast-in-place structure and to either the ramp leading up to the museum, or to the ground on the side of the campus walk. There are 52 pieces, and while each is somewhat different, all are cast from a single mold, one panel every other day for almost four months. Each is about four feet wide, up to 28 feet in along the vertical, up to 11 feet overhead along the horizontal, and less than 10” thick.

The pieces were fabricated in a factory in Ibaraki prefecture and trucked about 100 miles to the site, just north of Tokyo. Unlike flat pre-cast panels, they were cast on their sides, resulting in two smooth finished surfaces that are exposed. One-foot wide slots of varying lengths were blocked out along the seam lines, some continuing for the vertical to horizontal section of the piece. This creates light slits that animate and aerate the passages, placing the viewer in the space of the print, within the “floating world.”

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