TOMIHIRO MUSEUM COMPETITION

‘the journey’

The significance of the work of Tomihiro Hoshino lies in its strength of spirit.  At once strong yet gentle, direct yet subtle, his poems and watercolours are directed at the human heart and the human spirit.  It is significant that so many visitors have traveled to the current museum of his works and a great challenge to design a new museum building for the proud people of Azuma Village, to house a more complete collection of that work. 

The intention of this scheme is to create a new experience connecting the visitor to the works of Tomihiro Hoshino, and at the same time, to this extraordinarily beautiful site. For this reason, the building to house the works and words of Tomihiro Hoshino is conceived of as a ‘journey’.  Neither a literal journey through his life or an abstract journey through life in general, nor even a direct journey through the site, this new museum becomes a coalescence of all of these, and in so doing creates a very different and personal poetic journey within the life of each visitor.

the site

The new Tomihiro Museum is sited to the north of the existing museum building allowing the existing museum to operate until the new building is complete.  Once complete, the old museum will be demolished and the grounds landscaped as a Garden of Poetry.  The Museum’s gardener tends this garden, cultivating beds of plants and flowers referred to in the work of Tomihiro Hoshino.  Some of these flowers are transplanted to the few garden beds and window boxes scattered along the journey through the Museum.  Vehicular access and minimal parking will be discretely maintained (with all other parking located on the adjacent sites), but this is to be a mainly pedestrian area, allowing visitors and their families to freely experience the natural beauty of this site.

 the building

The design is for a very contemporary building. Constructed of concrete, steel, stone, timber, aluminium and glass, the new Tomihiro Museum is a worthy addition to contemporary museums in Japan.  It is a contemporary building though, that seeks to look towards the future through an understanding of the lessons of the past.  The past - in traditional terms, in experiential terms and in terms of the limits of some directions of contemporary architecture.  This design fuses together a strong desire to express an architecture of this time with a deep, sympathetic understanding of human experience and an acknowledgment of the gentleness of the work to be contained within.

The building reads as one entity, yet it is not monolithic - its fragmented forms woven together into a gentle, more human scale.  The form of the building appears as an abstract composition of intersecting orthogonal volumes – like a pile of wooden blocks - yet the museum’s interior is conceived as a serene meandering path that travels in both horizontal and vertical dimensions.  This path connects the visitor more directly to the works within and to the landscape outside through a series of spaces varied in volume, height, light intensity and finish - these variations thus creating a different relationship with each visitor’s sensory perceptions.

The new Tomihiro Museum has a clear sense of entry at the end of the entry path arriving from the south.  The main Entry to the whole building is located within the same volume as the entry and exit point from the gallery spaces.  Adjacent to the entry, along the southern side of the building, are all the public foyers, ticket counter, toilets and lockers, the manager’s office and staff room as well as the public meeting room, Shi-ga room, shop, café and performance corner.  The café can be accessed from the foyer and also directly from the Garden of Poetry to the south of the museum.

The Galleries for the permanent collection contain the required floor area but are configured as a series of galleries and passageways of varying volumes.  This allows the spaces to be more intimate while varied in size, creating a greater diversity of experiences, and still allowing the maximum number of visitors.  It also allows the opportunity for the work to be revealed to the viewer in a more subtle, measured way, interspersed with rest points and viewing points of the near and distant exterior landscape.  Finally, this arrangement creates a greater amount of wall space on which to display the watercolours, poems and explanatory texts of Tomihiro Hoshino.

The entry to the galleries is symbolically placed within the main entry/exit volume.  At the full-height entry door a secondary, south-facing volume containing a large skylight rises above the point of entry, washing the receiving wall and gallery entry point with sunlight.

The Main Gallery is the largest and highest of the gallery spaces, receiving groups of visitors before they disperse themselves along the route of ‘the journey’.  From this gallery both the Planned Exhibit Room and Video Room can be accessed.  The Main Gallery connects to the Bridge Passageway that then connects to the Middle Gallery.  Both ends of the passageway contain rest points – places from which to reflect on the work within and contemplate the view outside.  To the east, the passageway cantilevers over the wooded slope looking towards Kusakiko Lake.  To the west it looks down into the Moss and Rock Garden, but then also over the main entry/exit volume to the wooded slope beyond.  These fully glazed end walls contain a series of screens to adjust the available light intensity at any given time of day or year.  Finally, the floor of this passageway is constructed of glass, allowing visitors the unique experience of looking down upon the abstracted landscape of the Moss and Rock Garden below.  The garden uses some of the many granite rocks found on the site.  Both the Main Gallery and Bridge Passageway have gently ramped floors, allowing all visitors, both able or disabled, to be lifted above the surface of the site without the use of any stairs, subtly changing their relationship with both the interior and exterior of the museum building.  The Middle Gallery is more connected to the Middle Passageway, creating yet another type of volume for exhibiting the work.  In this gallery the floor level is at it’s highest point and completely horizontal allowing the storage rooms, stock room, fumigation area and loading area to be located directly underneath.  From here the journey continues down the Long Gallery, to the Exit Passageway.  This final passageway has solid walls for the display of work or text with a strip of glazing along the bottom looking into small gardens containing some of the flowers and plants painted by Tomihiro Hoshino.  The view of the Moss and Rock Garden is screened, for that can only be fully viewed from the first section of the Main Gallery and partly looked into from the Bridge and Middle Passageways.  The Moss and Rock Garden can be accessed though via the path to the east of the café and through the gate below the Bridge Passageway.  The final exit from the galleries is at the end of the Exit Passageway where, if visitors lift their gaze, they will look into the entry skylight to see a full view of the blue sky and sun beyond.  From here, the visitor is free to travel the path of the journey once more, or to quietly exit the same way they came in.

The design for this building attempts to create a bridge between respect for the work and the need for a significant receptacle for that work.  There are many combinations of experience contained within the design of the new Tomihiro Museum.  While ‘the journey’ creates a path of travel through the exhibited works, each visitor is allowed freedom to chart their own course through the site, the building and the galleries, allowing them to discover the joys, drama, magic and mystery of each.