A large wooden roof with a decorative structure depicting the emblem of the city Toyota tops this museum in Japan, completed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban.
Named Toyota City Museum, the building sits alongside the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, which was completed by Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi in 1995.
Its structure is built largely from local cedar, including its distinctive 90-metre-long roof that is perched on tall tapered columns.
Ban’s ambition was to transform the site into a “museum zone”, with the new building having its own visual identity but referencing the proportions of the existing art gallery.
“I wondered if the two sites could be made into a single museum zone, and by deliberately locating the new museum in the optimal position relative to the art museum, I could make it easier for visitors to understand and visit the two facilities and thus produce a synergistic effect,” said Ban.
“If the art museum by Yoshio Taniguchi is a masterpiece of modernist architecture that makes abundant use of metal and glass and represents the latter half of the twentieth century, then the Toyota City Museum is its polar opposite – a work with an organic facade and space in which wood is used in abundance so that it contributes to the solving of the problem of the environment, the most important theme of the twenty-first century.”
Toyota City Museum has a glazed facade with tapered, asterisk-shaped columns supporting a wooden roof.
The roof extends beyond the glazing to create a sheltered outdoor porch with a circular skylight.
The underside of the roof over the porch and double-height entrance space reveals a crisscrossing structure informed by the Toyota city emblem, which depicts two overlapping V-shaped arrows.
“When light enters the toplight of the entrance porch at noon on the summer solstice, the wooden beams cast a shadow of the city emblem on the floor,” said Ban.
The museum’s permanent collection, which is dedicated to the history of the city Toyota, is placed in a rounded room wrapped with a curved ramp. Glazed walls overlook the surrounding bamboo plants.
A large glass-covered display rack in the middle of the exhibition space, which showcases artefacts originally planned for storage, doubles as the building’s earthquake-resistant core.
“The enormous display rack became an integral part of this museum’s unique identity,” said Ban.
“By making it the earthquake-resistant core of the permanent exhibition space, it made possible a continuous band of windows along the oval ramp on the periphery of the permanent exhibition space that framed the beautiful surrounding bamboo woods and views.”
Elsewhere in the Toyota City Museum, a double-height hall that reveals the building’s wooden structure will host exhibitions and workshops, while a kid’s space contains wooden toys related to exhibition themes.
The museum is nestled into the landscape, stepping up to connect its second level to the ground floor of the adjacent art museum.
Landscape architecture studio Peter Walker and Partners, which designed the landscaping for the existing art museum, has removed a line of trees separating the two sides of the site to create a continuous garden space between them.
“The superb landscape designed by Peter Walker and Partners continuing from the art museum to the city museum binds together two buildings, representing different periods and styles that cover over thirty years of time – an art museum of supreme stillness in appearance and a museum that is the source of diverse public activities,” said Ban.
Ban, who leads architecture studio Shigeru Ban Architects, was recently named the architecture laureate for this year’s Praemium Imperiale awards by the Japan Art Association.
The architect is widely known for his use of timber but also his work in disaster relief. His other recent projects include a cross-laminated timber expansion for Ukraine’s largest hospital and a prototype for a temporary house named Log Paper House, which can be quickly assembled for victims of natural disasters.
The photography is by Hiroyuki Hirai.
