The Circular Glass Building by SANAA
SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) (Kazuyo Sejima born 1956; Ryue Nishizawa born 1966) · 1999 to 2004
From the lawn the museum looks like a single low disc of glass with a few white boxes rising above its flat roof. There is no grand facade, no steps and no obvious front door. The circle is about one hundred and thirteen metres across, and the wall is one continuous band of curved glass, so that from wherever you stand you see the park on the far side straight through the building. People drift in from four directions, cyclists lean their bikes against the glass, and children run around the edge. This openness was the whole idea. The city wanted a museum that felt like a park, and the architects gave it a shape with no back.
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, who work together as SANAA, won the competition in 1999 and the building opened in 2004. Inside, the galleries are separate white cubes of different heights, some four metres tall, some twelve, some lit from above by skylights. They are scattered within the circle like buildings in a small town, and the spaces between them become streets. Four glazed courtyards are cut through the roof so that daylight and rain reach the middle of the plan. Notice how thin everything is: the glass has almost no frames, the roof edge is a slender line, and the interior walls are pure white so that the art and the people supply the colour.
The building won the Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2004, and SANAA went on to receive the Pritzker Prize in 2010, with Kanazawa cited as one of their key works. It also changed the city. Kanazawa had been a quiet castle town known for gold leaf and lacquer, and the museum brought millions of visitors and a new confidence. Walk the corridor that circles the inside of the glass once before entering any gallery, and then walk the outside of the circle on the grass; the two loops together explain the building better than any plan.
Did You Know? The architects refused to give the museum a front, so the city had to decide for itself which of the four entrances would carry the address.
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