City Museum Yatsushiro
Yatsushiro City Museum Future Forest Museum
Yatsushiro (Jacuširo) is a city with a population of 130,000 located on the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu. It was to this second-largest city in Kumamoto Prefecture that the Tokyo architect Toyo Ito proposed a museum building in the early 1990s for the newly prepared project known as Artpolis, which was an initiative by the local council to engage talented creators and create a cultural district.
The turn of the 1980s and 1990s in Japanese architecture was characterized by a departure from Western postmodernism, and with the intoxication of emerging digital technologies, the buildings here began to become increasingly dematerialized, transparent, and devoid of solid defined edges. The main representative of this direction, which combines architecture and new media, was Toyo Ito, who published a work titled Blurring Architecture in 1995.
For Ito, who realized predominantly smaller family homes in the 1970s and 1980s, this was the largest public commission, additionally situated in a prestigious location directly opposite the historical villa Shohinken and not far from the ruins of the Jacuširo Castle. Ito did not shy away from the task and came up with a design for an almost immaterial glass gallery with a roof structure resembling stretched silver sails. Visitors enter the foyer via a gently curved outdoor ramp that leads them directly to the upper floor. A large part of the building program is hidden beneath a grass-covered mound. Thus, the exhibition halls must be largely artificially lit. The mound was artificially created, as due to the high groundwater level, it was impossible to build a basement, and Ito wanted to avoid a large building mass. The four-story museum thus resembles a small glass pavilion rather than a bulky exhibition institution. In the back part of the museum, a flattened cylinder is positioned horizontally above the tarp roofs, serving as a museum storage space where the exhibits are kept safe.
After nearly half a century of searching (from post-war brutalism to eclectic postmodernism), Japanese architecture (excluding the metabolism period) found itself again in the 1990s and returned to its traditional roots, a fact that was paradoxically enabled by the rise of digital technologies.
The turn of the 1980s and 1990s in Japanese architecture was characterized by a departure from Western postmodernism, and with the intoxication of emerging digital technologies, the buildings here began to become increasingly dematerialized, transparent, and devoid of solid defined edges. The main representative of this direction, which combines architecture and new media, was Toyo Ito, who published a work titled Blurring Architecture in 1995.
For Ito, who realized predominantly smaller family homes in the 1970s and 1980s, this was the largest public commission, additionally situated in a prestigious location directly opposite the historical villa Shohinken and not far from the ruins of the Jacuširo Castle. Ito did not shy away from the task and came up with a design for an almost immaterial glass gallery with a roof structure resembling stretched silver sails. Visitors enter the foyer via a gently curved outdoor ramp that leads them directly to the upper floor. A large part of the building program is hidden beneath a grass-covered mound. Thus, the exhibition halls must be largely artificially lit. The mound was artificially created, as due to the high groundwater level, it was impossible to build a basement, and Ito wanted to avoid a large building mass. The four-story museum thus resembles a small glass pavilion rather than a bulky exhibition institution. In the back part of the museum, a flattened cylinder is positioned horizontally above the tarp roofs, serving as a museum storage space where the exhibits are kept safe.
After nearly half a century of searching (from post-war brutalism to eclectic postmodernism), Japanese architecture (excluding the metabolism period) found itself again in the 1990s and returned to its traditional roots, a fact that was paradoxically enabled by the rise of digital technologies.
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