“I wanted to create a huge roof,” Kuma says. “I attempted to connect people and the ground once again with the roof.”

Much like a farmhouse, an arched roof rises up to the height of two floors and extends roughly 50 meters laterally over the length of the museum’s main building, which occupies part of a long block in the swanky Minami Aoyama area of the city and is home to a substantial collection of traditional Japanese and Asian works of art.

“The beautiful shadows created by roofs were destroyed by post-war Japan’s concrete-box architecture,” says Kuma, 55. “Shadows link architecture to the ground and give comfort to the architecture and warmth to the city.”

For the three-and-a-half-year project, completed last October, Kuma, who majored in architecture at the University of Tokyo before studying at Columbia University in New York, blended a minimalist feel with Japanese cultural touches rooted in nature, an approach that has become the architect’s trademark.

His preference for natural aesthetics is also on display at the Suntory Museum of Art at Tokyo Midtown, whose interior exudes warmth through an emphasis on wood and paper, and in his prefabricated houses for retailer Muji. The small domiciles are designed to redirect sunlight through the interior.
Kuma says that he wanted to achieve a similar effect with the new Nezu, despite it being a steel-framed structure. “Although concrete is used in the structure,” he explains, “it doesn’t appear in the parts visible from the outside. The building is supported by solid steel pillars which create an overall scale similar to that of a wood structure.”

Furthering this concept is an exterior that features a long entrance corridor beneath an eave of the roof whose edge is fronted by a line of bamboo and stones. At the museum’s doors, guests enter a vaulted atrium filled with Buddhist sculptures and bounded by large panes of glass that offer a view of the Nezu’s expansive gardens: 1.8 hectares of greenery, pathways, ponds, waterfalls, stone bridges and teahouses.

“I treated the museum as a kind of gate connecting the city and the sacred garden of the museum,” explains Kuma, who likens the bamboo corridor to the kind often found leading to ceremonial tearooms. “I tried to calm down the bustling air of Omotesando, which is one of the liveliest shopping streets in Japan, with the gate. It plays the same role that a torii does for a shrine.”

The new 5,000-square-meter museum contains a sampling of the 7,000 paintings, works of calligraphy, scrolls, sculptures, ceramics and bamboo crafts that make up the Nezu’s collection. The six galleries, a substantial increase over the two in the previous incarnation, employ top-of-the-line technologies. Display cases are illuminated with light-emitting diodes to provide a subdued setting. Sound intrusion is reduced through specially constructed cork floorings and ceilings covered in cloth.