Kadokawa Musashino Museum | Japan-Guides Home

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🤗 External Mapping

The Kadokawa Musashino Museum is a futuristic cultural labyrinth. Granite stone was chosen for the museum, which, as a material of intrusive rock in magma rock, expresses to a certain extent the architectural shape of breaking through the ground. The transformation of invisible energy into shapely architecture is also what Mr. Kengo Kuma had in mind for the Kadokawa Musashino Museum. The use of an unprecedented rock as a building material was a groundbreaking and bold idea.

The 20,000 granite stones used for the façade are from a quarry in China and are called “Black Fantasy”. The most prominent feature is the white polka dots on the black stone surface. The architects also applied a special rough texture to the surface of the stone to convey a sense of harmony between the natural and the man-made.

This labyrinth of boulders is also known as the “angular” building because each side has a completely different shape. Each side of the building has a different shape, and the experience is different at different times of the day and from different angles. When you look up at this silent monument at sunset, you will quietly realize the fruitfulness that cannot be described.

In addition to the sunset, the water feature under the Kadokawa Musashino Museum is also the “soul” of the site. As the source of life, it is natural to love water, and the design of the water feature incorporates the warm texture of granite to reflect the exquisite quality of the landscape. When there is no water, glossy granite can also show a certain degree of water reflection.

🤗 Internal Labyrinth

The interior of the building consists of a 1,000-square-meter gallery, a “Bookshelf Theater” with about 50,000 books surrounded by 8-meter-high bookshelves, and an animation museum that introduces Japanese animation.

The interior surface of the museum is also rough and dry, mainly displaying contemporary art, which is regarded as elegant art, and the wooden boards here are all misplaced, unlike the regularity of the wooden boards of the bookshelves in the past, and there are also anime and black and white spatial scenes in the interior, together with a variety of “low-culture” exhibitions between the real and the fake, presenting a sense of order in chaos and wrapping up the sense of “order”. The exhibition is a sense of order in chaos and a sense of wrapping.

Despite the different exhibition themes within the space, the architects attempted to tie them together through uniform materials such as cedar plywood, cypress wood and stainless steel mesh. The architects have integrated several museum and library spaces: a gallery is in the center of the space, while surrounding it are library spaces and the outermost function space is the museum.

This form of combination is much like the state of stringing together when people receive information from the outside world. Multiple changes and reorganization of thoughts create a labyrinth, and the interior of the Kadokawa Musashino Museum is likewise a labyrinthine existence.

Mr. Kengo Kuma designed three different forms of bookshelves to accommodate different book sizes. All the books can be placed perfectly on the shelves, and they can also communicate with the objects displayed in the foreground. One of the 85-meter-long walls of bookshelves contains 44 different units, creating six differentiated visual graphics. Accordingly, the area was named 'Book Street'.

Kadokawa is synonymous with Mr. Kengo Kuma's desire to integrate with nature and honor the energy of the earth.

🤗 External Mapping

🤗 Internal Labyrinth

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