Murai Masanari Art Museum

1-6-12 Nakamachi, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo, Japan
2004.05
Art Museum
268m2

The project is an intimate art museum dedicated to the late Masanari Murai (1905-1999), a pioneer of modernist painting in Japan. By remodeling the 60-year-old wooden house located in a quiet residential area in the suburbs of Tokyo, and having been built for Mr. Murai during the 1940s, I turned the original building into an art museum. The underlying concept of this remodeling project is “a double box” or in other words the nested nature of Japanese lacquered lunchboxes, in which a small box is enclosed inside a larger box. This art museum borrows this concept and translates it into spatial form.

First, I preserved, exactly in its original form, the small room that Mr. Murai had used as his atelier. I then enclosed this room in a much larger box, and used the space created between the large box and the small box as the display area. The atelier looks like one of the objects displayed inside the large box; conversely, seen from the atelier, the outer box looks like a new wooden fence put up alongside the house’s outside wall. The opening thus created is both a discontinuity in physical space and a discontinuity in time. Mr. Murai’s works are displayed in this anomalous space that acts as a threshold between “the old time” and “the new time.”

Construction materials from the original house, which has been demolished, are pasted in louvered fashion onto the outer box’s exterior wall, allowing them to live on in the gap created between “the old time” and “the new time”.