A JAPANESE PAVILION FOR the BOSTON MUSEUM OF ARTS, MA

 

Museum extension plans by designing a Study Center for Contemporary Japanese Arts and Culture next to the Japanese Garden on the Fens. The Pavilion will house the collection of Japanese transformer toys that are being part of contemporary popular cultural movements along with anime and manga. The main question of the studio is how the hybrid form of Japanese cultural production might be consumed in a foreign setting. 

Explorations of how new paradigms for collecting and curating could affect architectural space and how a building can transform to adapt its environment have been the key notions of the project. 

 

Total square footage: 33,000 - 40,000 SF

Starting point: Transformer toys

Choose a transformer toy and analyze its iconography, taxonomy, and formal properties. Consider this question: what are the ways of making? 

 

TOY: GUNDAM RX-78-2

Mobile Suit Gundam by Yoshiyuki Tomino

ANALYSIS: Focusing on how parts becoming a whole; the relationship between the inside and outside - what one sees from outside is different from what one sees from inside just as a pilot who is controlling Gundam is completely unrevealed from outside. 

Different parts/components of Gundam are conceptually taken as jewels of a necklace of space.

These jewels, which indicate different programs of the museum: a library, audio-visual hall, education/research room, cafe, storage, office, and gallery spaces, are connected through the linear circulation of the pavilion.

Forms of the “jewels” were determined by the algorithm that I’ve given myself using the points/corners of the site boundary and the existing museum and connecting those points to create spaces. The shapes are intuitively formed within the dissections created by points and lines.