A Critical View: The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa
In the extreme abstraction and perfect clarity of its spatial organization and its material assemblage, SANAA’s new building in Kanazawa is like a prototypical diagram of the ideal contemporary art museum: an iconic enclosure containing “white cube” galleries of various sizes, with secondary functions in the interstices. The architecture itself is reduced to the fewest possible tectonic elements, comprising flat surfaces with a minimum of articulation at their junctions. Even so, it seems that the radically reductive approach to detailing in SANAA’s earlier work – prioritizing visually immaculate connections ahead of longevity – has given way to a more pragmatic attitude toward issues such as waterproofing and insulation, causing a noticeable thickening of the joints.
