HOME / MajorWorks / TAKENAKA TOPICS 2007 / 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT
The 54-meter long, graceful large roof, constructed by welding and polishing steel plates. The café is shown on the left, and the museum on the right.
| This museum has opened on the northwestern side of Tokyo Midtown, which itself opened in March this year, on what was previously Defense Agency land. The location was designed as a place where "the world could be seen through designs." With directors including designers Issey Miyake, Taku Satoh, Naoto Fukazawa, and design journalist Noriko Kawakami, Tadao Ando Architects & Associates and Nikken Sekkei were responsible for the design and supervision of the project. |
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Because this building, consisting of the café wing and the museum wing, was designed to be public open space within the district plan area, the limitations on the building area and the sun shadow control were very severe. As a result, of the 1,932 square-meter total floor space, less than 600 square meters are aboveground, so most of the museum is buried underground.
The main characteristic of the exterior appearance is the 54-meter long steel plate roof. The 16-millimeter thick steel plates were welded together, polished, and painted on site. In order to realize the concept of "a single sheet" without any bends, shipbuilding and aircraft manufacturing technologies were researched and applied.
11.44-meter double-insulated glass, the longest of its type in the world, has been used for horizontal slits in the exposed decorative concrete exterior wall on the northern side. Taking into consideration the patterns between the joints, 16-millimeter thick steel checker plates have been used for the flooring of the inner garden (Sunken Court). 70-millimeter scrapings of solid steel are used for the back mullion supporting the 12.2-meter long curtain wall opposite the atrium. With the exposed decorative concrete, consideration was given to the materials used for the moulds, and the production methods, as well as to the accuracy of the bar arrangement, so that after completion, nothing could be seen of the layout or the small markings left by the nails.
Features and architectural devices have been used in fine points throughout the building, including the trapezoidal elevator, the washroom basins using bent solid stainless steel sheets, the hanging steps that wind their way down from the entrance to the underground, the dark, narrow corridor that twists around, the fire extinguisher boxes that are designed to look as if they have been made from a single bent sheet, and the design of the signs, in the same tones and shades of the walls.
