The complex's electropolished aluminum cladding allows the project to blend in and blend into the district of the Japanese capital, despite being a building whose formal solution could focus the prominence of the immediate urban environment. However, the mirror effect produced by the material used allows users to recognize the surrounding urban landscape.
Internally, the complex has a very different program of uses that know how to organize themselves strategically in this highly polyhedral volume, from fixed and temporary exhibitions such as libraries or cafeterias.
Description of project by Kazuyo Sejima
This is a project for a museum of Hokusai Katsushika standing in a small park in Ryogoku Sumida-ward, Tokyo. Ryogoku, the birthplace of Hokusai, has a gridded street pattern with middle to small size buildings are standing. A requested building volume of the museum was divided into smaller volumes to fit the scale of surrounding buildings. Those smaller volumes merge into one another at a certain floor as a single building, and distance each other at a certain floor as several buildings.
The building has a closed enclosure in order to preserve Ukiyoe painting, however has an open relationship to the outside through the slits in between the volumes. The program consists with regular and special exhibition space, storage space, and in addition, multipurpose hall, café, library and so on. The friendly scenery of surrounding townscape will reflect onto the electro polishing aluminum façade of the building.
