The Art Library and the Kurokawa annexe
Kisho Kurokawa (1934 to 2007) · 2007
Beside the restaurant on the third floor is a quiet, free library devoted entirely to art. It holds exhibition catalogues from museums across Japan and around the world, art periodicals, monographs and reference books, and it is open to anyone who walks in, with no ticket and no membership. A second reading room, the annexe, occupies the small older building beside the museum, a former research institute of the University of Tokyo that was kept when the site was cleared, and it holds the older catalogues and journals.
The library exists because the centre has no collection of its own. When the government created the National Art Center it gave it three tasks: to hold exhibitions, to educate, and to collect and share information about art, so the catalogues here stand in for the paintings other museums own. Look at the shelves of catalogues from the artist association exhibitions, which go back decades and are a record of Japanese painting that exists almost nowhere else. Staff can help in English, and the reading tables look through the louvres toward the trees.
On your way in or out, look at the small red building near the gate in the photograph. That is the annexe, and it is one of the few reminders of what stood here before. The site was an army barracks before the war and then a university campus, and the row of trees along the street was kept from that time. The library is a good place to spend an hour if the exhibition you wanted is sold out or if you have come mainly for the architecture; sitting in a corner of Kurokawa's building with a catalogue open is a very Tokyo way to pass an afternoon.
Did You Know? Anyone can use the library without a ticket, and many art students in Tokyo treat it as their second home because no other library in the city collects exhibition catalogues so thoroughly.
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