Masanari Murai Art Museum
Tokyo, Japan
Kengo Kuma & Associates

Kengo Kuma has Given a new meaning to the term “extreme makeover” with his transformation of an artist’s house

© Daici Ano

For more photos click on 'photos & drawings' above. To see the people and products behind this project click on 'people & products.'

By Naomi R. Pollock, AIA

It is often said that one person’s junk is another’s treasure. But to Masanari Murai, one of Japan’s first Modern painters, everything was a treasure. “He just hated to throw stuff out,” says Itsuko Murai, the artist’s widow and the director of the Masanari Murai Art Museum. Moved by the beauty inherent in coffee pots, clay dolls, and countless everyday objects, the artist preferred adding rooms to parting with possessions. Instead of deaccessioning, he simply enlarged his house. Like Masanari’s bold, abstract canvases, his house, with its multiple additions and voluminous contents, was a work of art. “I thought the house was chaotic, but I like that kind of chaos,” says architect Kengo Kuma. However, it took the Tokyo architect’s editing as well as design skills to transform this eclectic mixed-media creation into a museum.

When the museum was first being planned, there was talk of leaving the rambling house as it was and simply opening it up to the public. But this proved impossible. Built in 1938, the original house was a “cottage style” wood frame structure located in the middle of a residential neighborhood west of central Tokyo. But by the time the artist died in 1999, the cluttered house had become a fire hazard that ultimately had to be taken down. Instead, Kuma preserved the essence of Masanari’s home by deftly salvaging parts of the old building and incorporating them into his new architecture.

The heart of Kuma’s 1,761-square-foot museum is a faithful reconstruction of the artist’s atelier: a pastiche of wood siding, door frames, and other lumberyard leftovers artfully added to the main house in the 1950s by a local carpenter. Originally, this atelier jutted out into the garden, but Kuma treated it like an artifact by encasing it within the new museum’s steel-frame exterior enclosure. Between the atelier and the new outer skin is a high-ceilinged trough of space for a gallery where selections from the artist’s vast collection of objects are displayed alongside his own artworks—paintings, ceramic vessels, and other pieces made of wood and metal. Thin steel stair treads lead up to the second-floor display area masked by metal-mesh walls and an efficiency apartment for Mrs. Murai. Kuma’s palette of pristine, white walls, neutral concrete floors, and crisp detailing complement the robust colors and strong forms of the artworks as well as contrast with the atelier’s dark wood surfaces and well-used furniture.

Want the full story? Read the entire article in our January 2005 issue.
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Formal name of Project:
Masanari Murai Art Museum

Location:
Tokyo, Japan

Gross square footage:
1,761 sq. ft.

Client:
Itsuko Murai

Architect:
Kengo Kuma & Associates
2-24-8 Minami Aoyama. Minato-ku. Tokyo 107.0062. Japan