Architecture
Kengo Kuma’s monolithic museum
The museum had a “soft opening” on August 1st, 2020.
Image courtesy of: Design Boom
Recently, the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma designed a monolithic museum called Kadokawa Culture Museum. The starkly designed museum is built with a facade that is formed with 20,000 individual pieces of granite.
The exterior appears pixelated and the interior has five floors that include an exhibition gallery, a garden and pavilion, an art museum, a shop, a shrine, and a cafe. However the most amazing feature is the “bookshelf theater” that has floor-to-ceiling bookshelves 26-feet-tall and is able to hold 50,000 titles.
A guest room at the hotel.
Image courtesy of: Sally Anime
The building is located around 20 miles from Tokyo and is part of the Tokorozawa Sakura Town development, a locale hoping to become Japan’s hottest spot for Japanese pop culture. In case you haven’t experienced enough local culture, you can check into the EJ Anime Hotel. The hotel has 33 rooms, all equipped with huge screens on which you can play your favorite game or watch your favorite manga.
The design concept behind the hotel, aptly called the EJ Anime Hotel, is that everyone should be able to stay in a “story you love.” Coincidentally, “EJ” stands for Entertainment Japan.
The building’s massive exterior.
Image courtesy of: Design Boon, photographed by: Kenshu Shintsubo
The museum is a nod to Japan’s unique entertainment culture. The design represents a rock floating on water and especially mimics that when viewed from the large reflecting pond at the building’s east end.
The enormous building’s five floors each have a distinct purpose. The first floor has a manga (a style of Japanese comic books and graphic novels) library that extends to the second floor. Currently on the first floor is an exhibition dedicated to Kengo Kuma, “Kengo Kuma, The birth of an art space connected to nature.” The second floor also has a rock museum which explains the building’s architecture.
Up close…
Image courtesy of: This Is Colossal
The museum’s third floor houses the EJ Anime Museum and the fourth floor is filled with almost 11,000-square-feet of exhibition space that showcases a number of themes including: nature, science, natural history, art, fashion, the environment, and society. Finally, the fifth floor holds the picturesque “Bookshelf Theater” and 10,000 titles of books. In addition, there is a restaurant and cafe as well as the Mushashino (relating to art) Gallery.
From the museum’s exhibition in honor of Kengo Kuma, an actual facade material from the exterior exemplifying Kuma’s “transcendent architecture in stone.”
Image courtesy of: Artscape Japan, photographed by: James Lambiasi
The Kadokawa Culture Museum project was developed by Kadokawa, one of Japan’s biggest manga novel publishers. The structure is atypical of Japanese architecture which is normally subdued. Kuma says that he imagined the building as having emerged from the earth’s crust or as a meteorite falling on earth.
