The Museum of Wood (Tadao Ando)
In the deep forests of Mikata-Gun, Hyogo, Japan lays a simple yet quite intricate structure. Constructed of wood, steel, and reinforced concrete, it towers 16 meters high and covers over 1,900 square meters. The Museum of Wood is “conceived as a great truncated cone,” which can be described by the Japanese concept, kinari, or beauty in its purest form of aesthetic expression. The museum was completed in April 1994 by Tadao Ando Architect and Associates to commemorate Arbor Day and celebrate the study of wood in Japan. Tadao Ando was born in Osaka, Japan in 1941. After graduating from high school he found himself in a craftsman-like environment and was self-educated. Living near many shrines, temples, tea ceremony rooms, gardens, and folk houses which were regarded as national treasures and cultural assets, he found himself visiting them frequently and from these traditional concepts he discovered his own style and interpretation of form. The next following paragraphs will describe how Tadao Ando uses certain details in the façade, site plan, and volumes in his Museum of Wood to create a certain feeling and experience by intertwining the concepts of material, geometries, and nature.
explicit connection and relationship with nature. The ‘Forest Monolith’ as Phoebe Chow describes it, is far from any city lights and a bustling urban environment.1 Remote from these unnatural technologies, it finds itself in its own niche and captures the true elements of nature. The use of wood as its primary material of construction, gives one an impression that the museum is not a disturbance or conflict with the environment but actually a sophisticated part of the nature. From the outside, it is hard for a visitor to determine the front entrance that hides on the south-eastern facade of the main building. It is boringly plain and simple, with no dynamic or interesting shape but the cut cone. Looking deeper will expose that the silhouette of this façade appears to be a stump of a gigantic tree, which is horizontally lapped with wooden planks giving it a rough texture similar to that of tree bark. In the center of the stump is an opening and the entrance or main doorway to the structure. It may look as if it is the dwelling of some fairy-tale forest creature resides in this part of the building. This amusing but intentional concept may have been part of Ando’s scheme to fuse the building into its environment. Ando has been known for his discipline in using strict and pure geometries to create a meaningful volume. Combining these elements with space and nature, he says, “Architecture comes to posses power and becomes radiant only when these elements come together.” As in the Pantheon, the Museum of Wood resembles its use of volume, geometry, and the nature of light to undergo some sort of epiphany. “…so that the structure (Pantheon) may be said to be composed around a huge sphere. It is when this structure is illuminated by light from an oculus 9 meters in diameter at the top of the dome, that architectural space truly becomes manifest.”3 As from the inner courtyard of the mu
Some topics in this essay:
Museum Wood,
Phoebe Chow,
Osaka Japan,
Tadao Ando,
Hyogo Japan,
museum wood,
Arbor Day,
tadao ando,
,
Architect Associates,
site plan,
observatory station,
façade site plan,
elements nature,
geometry nature,
main building,
façade site,
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Approximate Word count = 1296
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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