The atrium
Kisho Kurokawa (1934 to 2007) · 2007
Step through the doors and the whole height of the building opens up in front of you. The atrium is a long, tall hall wedged between the glass wave on one side and the plain concrete wall of the galleries on the other, and it is filled with daylight filtered through the louvres. Walkways cross it on the upper floors, escalators rise through it, and in the middle of the floor stand the two great inverted cones that carry the cafe and the restaurant. The floor is pale wood, the ceiling is a lattice of wooden slats, and the effect is of being inside a bright, quiet canyon.
Walk to the far end and look back to see how the curve of the glass pulls the space along with it. The concrete wall on the gallery side is deliberately blank, so that the atrium reads as a buffer zone between the city outside and the art within, a place to decompress before or after an exhibition. Kurokawa called this an intermediate space, an idea he took from the engawa, the covered veranda of a traditional Japanese house, which is neither fully inside nor fully outside. Notice how the light changes as you walk: near the glass it is green and dappled, near the wall it is even and grey.
The atrium is free to enter and has become a public living room for this part of Tokyo. Office workers eat lunch on the benches, students sketch, and visitors who came for the shop or the library linger without buying a ticket at all. It is also one of the best places in the city to watch the weather. On a rainy day the glass streams and the wood glows, and in the evening the whole facade lights up from inside and can be seen from the street as a wall of lanterns.
Did You Know? The atrium appears in the animated film Your Name from 2016, in the scene where the characters meet on the cone-top terrace, and fans still come to photograph it.
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