The 21st Century Museum in Kanazawa: SANAA’s Glass Circle
Opened in 2004 beside Kenrokuen, the museum by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa is a single-storey glass disc 112.5 metres across, with no front and no back. It changed what a city museum could be.
The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa opened on 9 October 2004 on a site in the middle of the city, a few minutes’ walk from the garden of Kenrokuen. It was designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, who work together as SANAA. Within a year it had received 1.57 million visitors, in a city of fewer than half a million people.
A building without a front
The museum is a low circle, 112.5 metres in diameter, with an outer wall of glass. A circle has no principal facade, and that was the point: the site is approached from several directions, and the building has entrances on different sides rather than one grand door. People walking across the lawn can see through the glass into the building, and those inside see the city.
Inside the ring the galleries are separate boxes of different proportions, with ceilings from 4 to 12 metres high, set apart from one another like buildings in a small town. Corridors run between them, and four courtyards, glazed on all sides, bring daylight into the middle of the plan. The galleries rise through the flat roof to different heights, so that from a distance the museum looks like a cluster of white blocks on a disc.
Two zones
The plan puts community functions at the edge and the museum at the centre. A library, a lecture hall and a children’s workshop sit around the perimeter with the free public areas. The ticketed exhibition zone is in the middle. A visitor can spend an hour in the building, see several works of art and pay nothing.
This arrangement reflects what the city wanted: a museum used like a park, by residents as well as tourists. The collection concentrates on works made from 1980 onward that, in the museum’s phrase, propose new values.
The works that stay
Several works were made for the building and are permanently installed. The best known is The Swimming Pool by the Argentine artist Leandro Erlich, made in 2004. From the courtyard it looks like an ordinary pool with people standing, clothed and dry, on the bottom. A sheet of glass carries a shallow layer of water; beneath it is an empty blue room that visitors enter from the galleries. The view from above is in the free zone. The room below is part of the ticketed area.
Olafur Eliasson’s Colour Activity House, added in 2010, stands outside on the lawn: three curved walls of coloured glass in cyan, magenta and yellow, which change the colour of the city as one walks between them. James Turrell’s Blue Planet Sky is a room with a square opening in the ceiling, where visitors sit and watch the sky.
Why it matters
The museum was one of the best-known early public buildings by SANAA, and it helped make the practice’s reputation abroad. Its combination of transparency, a non-hierarchical plan and free public space has been much imitated. For Kanazawa it balanced a city known for feudal heritage with something of the present. Even in 2020, a year of reduced travel, it still received nearly a million visitors.
For travellers
Allow one to two hours. The free zone and the exhibition zone keep different hours, and the exhibition zone closes one day a week, so check the museum’s website before going. The lower room of The Swimming Pool is managed by timed entry on busy days and closes periodically for maintenance, so check the museum’s site for current closures.
The museum combines naturally with Kenrokuen, across the road, and with the D.T. Suzuki Museum, ten minutes away on foot. Sejima and Nishizawa’s later work in Japan includes the Teshima Art Museum, by Nishizawa, on one of the art islands of the Seto Inland Sea.
