A MUSEUM TO REMEMBER

Over the last decade or so Japan has seen the construction of a considerable number of smaller first rate museum buildings scattered across the entire country. My impressions of the Miho Museum in Shiga Prefecture have already been recorded in earlier versions of these reports; yesterday we visited yet another of these striking additions to the national cultural scene at Byodoin outside Kyoto in nearby Uji.

At the heart of the Byodoin complex is a Buddhist image hall dating to the eleventh century built by the Fujiwara family of court nobles as part of an enormous aristocratic compound located in Uji on what was then the rural outskirts of the capital city. Known since the seventeenth century as the Phoenix Hall, perhaps because of its overall resemblance to a bird in flight landing on a nearby pond, Byodoin remains even today one of Japan's premier tourist sites.

Besides the Hall itself as an architectural example of early aristocratic sophistication, Byodoin also houses an impressive image of the Buddha by Jocho (one of the culture's most important sculptors) and, high above on the surrounding white washed walls, a superb set of heavenly angels depicted as musicians and dancers accompanying the Buddha on journeys to retrieve the souls of the dead from their earthly existences.

The problem in the past has always been that these wonderful, lively wooden images floated on clouds so high above and obscured by the gloom of the unlit hall that they could barely be seen. Now, however, some of them have become the centerpiece of a beautifully-realized new museum skillfully designed not only to show off these images but also to blend into the larger temple complex as unobtrusefully as possible. The result is absolutely stunning!

One of the basic assumptions of modern Japanese architecture has long been that concrete should be regarded as a "natural" material and, therefore, allowed to show its basic character unadorned. The impression of the grain of the wooden sheets used to mold the concrete was essentially the only "decoration" allowed in many of the modern buildings constructed in Japan during the 1930s through the 1950s. I have always regarded the results in all too many cases as uninteresting because of the grey dullness of the material itself. Concrete just didn't seem all that inherently interesting.



The new glass and concrete museum at Byodoin, however, encased the poured concrete in forms of narrow wooden strips placed at different depths, resulting in textured walls of great beauty and sublime orderliness. Natural light is allowed into the structure indirectly, and the interiors seem subtly lit so as purposefully to allow the objects contained therein to dominate against the architectural background provided by the building itself.

The entire structure is anchored in a hillside so as to intrude as little as possible on the original temple site. Even an outdoor seating area is very carefully placed so as to maximize its tranquility without overwhelming its natural and historical surroundings.


As I told seminar participants at the time, this unexpected pleasure made the entire trip so far worthwhile -- and here it's only been two days since we began!