Renewal of Bato Hiroshige Museum
The louvers, conceived as an architectural translation of the distinctive depiction of “rain” rendered in lines by Hiroshige, have been embraced as the symbolic feature of the building since its inception.
Twenty-five years after the building’s completion in 2000, the wooden louvers had deteriorated significantly with age. Thanks in part to the generous support received through crowdfunding, they were successfully restored.
The roof, where deterioration is inevitably most severe when constructed of wood, was replaced with aluminum printed with a wood-grain finish. A random arrangement using 35 different louver patterns was adopted to recreate the natural variation of the original. The cross-sections of the removed wooden louvers were scanned, allowing the “DNA” of the wood to be carried over into the exposed end grain of the new aluminum louvers.
