The Main Building by Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier (1887 to 1965) · 1957 to 1959
Before you go inside, stand in the forecourt and look up at the box that floats above you. Le Corbusier designed the National Museum of Western Art in the late nineteen fifties as a square block of galleries raised on slender concrete columns, so that the ground floor becomes an open, shaded space you walk beneath. The outer walls are clad in rough panels of precast concrete studded with green pebbles, and the whole composition is set out with his Modulor, a system of proportions derived from the height of a man with his arm raised. It is the only building by Le Corbusier in East Asia, and since 2016 it has been part of a World Heritage listing that gathers his work across seven countries.
The idea behind the plan is what he called a museum of unlimited growth. You enter at the centre, climb a ramp into a tall hall lit from above, and then move outward through galleries that spiral around it, in the way a snail shell grows. In theory the museum could keep adding galleries at the edge forever. Notice how the ceilings change height as you walk, how light drops in from clerestories and courtyards, and how the concrete columns are left exposed inside. The details were carried out by three Japanese architects who had trained in his Paris studio, Kunio Maekawa, Junzo Sakakura and Takamasa Yoshizaka.
The building was completed in March 1959, and it had a diplomatic purpose. France had agreed to return the Matsukata Collection on condition that Japan build a proper museum to house it, and the commission went to the most famous architect in France. Sixty years of restoration and earthquake strengthening have kept the museum in use, and the forecourt was recently returned to the open gravel plan of 1959. Look for the small windows in the facade near the roof: they light the galleries from behind, not from the side.
Did You Know? Le Corbusier visited Japan only once, for a week in 1955, and never saw the finished building.
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