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H ISTORICAL MUSEUM ,
O SAKA , J APAN
ARCHITECT
T ADAO A NDO

WATER AND LIGHT

A new musem dedicated to the relics and techniques
of ancient Japanese water engineering is a series of
soaring spaces that lyrically synthesize water and light.

The Japanese are mad for museums, erecting elaborate structures to

celebrate sand, sunsets, bridges (this last a playful recreation of
Palladios unrealized design for the Rialto in Venice) and just about
everything else that can be put within four walls. Tadao Ando has
made a specialty of this building type, designing museums for children,
literature, wood, daylight, and two for prehistoric tombs, as well as a
succession of art museums most recently in Fort Worth, Texas. In
each, he strives to find an appropriate expression of the theme,
developing architectural metaphors from an austere vocabulary of
concrete planes and rotundas, ramps and stairs. In the best of these,
there is a harmonious match of container and contents; in others, the
processional routes and soaring volumes upstage the exhibits and
exhaust less athletic visitors.
The Sayamaike Historical Museum in Andos home city of Osaka is
an impressive monument that conveys the power of water and the
challenge it presents to engineers who want to tame it. It is located
beside an artificial lake that dates back to the seventh century. Over
the centuries, monks and feudal retainers applied their skills to
enlarging the earthen dam and installing wood or stone conduits to
carry water to neighbouring fields. Relics of this early engineering
were excavated when the shore of the lake was recently heightened
and landscaped to serve as a flood control basin. A 15.4m high slice
through the old dam was painstakingly cut away, dried out, and
reassembled to show how layers were added and sluices threaded
through by a succession of builders.

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1
The museum is poised on the edge
of an artificial lake that dates back to
the seventh century.
2
Crisp cuboid volumes are reflected in
the buildings internal pools.
3
Simple geometries combine with
Andos characteristically austere
palette of materials.

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ar feb 03 ando web

6/18/03

H ISTORICAL MUSEUM ,
O SAKA , J APAN
ARCHITECT
T ADAO A NDO

12:38 PM

Page 40

11

11

second floor plan

long section

3
3

4
5

6
4

cross section

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

first floor plan

entrance hall
exhibition space
staff offices
court
auditorium
foyer
rotunda
central pool
storage
excavated dam
cascading pools

9
4
9

8
2

10

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site plan

ground floor plan (scale approx 1:1250)

4
A rotunda acts as a hinge between
the two parts of the building.
5
The long central pool is framed by
diaphanous, cascading walls of water,
with the rotunda beyond.

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H ISTORICAL MUSEUM ,
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ARCHITECT
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6
Visitors pass along the edge of the
central pool, with its light diffusing
curtain of water.
7
The soaring internal spaces were
determined by the scale of the
buildings contents.
8
The excavated wall of a dam housed
in a triple-height exhibition hall is
museums main archaeological relic.

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To house this earthwork, Ando has erected a multi-level bastion that

rises like a castle beside the pond, shutting out its banal suburban
neighbours. A switchback ramp scales a battered wall of rough granite
blocks and you wonder if defenders will appear on the ramparts
above and drive you off with rocks and boiling oil. You emerge into a
bare concrete piazza and look for an entry to a windowless slab that
could be the castle keep. The monolith is enigmatic and seemingly
impenetrable, its cross-bracing expressed in bands of white on grey
stone. Steps in a corner of the piazza lead down to a court in which
you are suddenly overwhelmed by water cascading down the walls,
splashing over a recessed walkway, and throwing off a fine mist as
though you had scaled a dam and found yourself in its sluiceway,
wondering if the force of the torrent might carry you away. Its one of
Andos most compelling theatrical coups, but he diminishes its impact
by extending the underwater passage into a rotunda, from where
another ramp leads to the mid-level entrance in the side of the slab.
Within the museum, the brute power of the masonry and tumbling
water is dissipated. Though the earth dam may be historically
important, its not much to look at and it is dwarfed by the hall that
rises far above, even when you are descending the ramp that leads
past it to the display area below. Archaeologists may appreciate the
fragments of primitive plumbing that are stretched out through
another hall and wrapped around the rotunda, but students of
architecture are more likely to ignore the displays and gaze
admiringly at this monumental sculpture by a master of light, space,
and meticulously poured concrete. As such, its magnificent, but it
drew only a couple of visitors on a recent Sunday afternoon. Nor
does the lake lure you to its sterile banks, for the abundant wildlife it
may once have contained now survives only as a video (maddeningly
repeated in the lobby) in which two insufferably cute infants fly in on a
leaf and chatter excitedly about the birds and flowers as music tinkles
over this fantasy of nature preserved. MICHAEL WEBB

Architect
Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Osaka
Project team
Tadao Ando, Takaaki Mizutani, Kanya Sogo
Structural engineer
Wada
Mechanical engineer
Setsubi-Giken
Photographs
Shigeo Ogawa/Japan Architect

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