Tadao Ando Chikatsu-Asuka Historical Museum, Minami-Kawachi, Osaka, Japan, Exterior perspective c. 1989-91

  • Not on view

[Tadao] Ando's drawings are like a hieroglyphic map that if read properly does not lead one to the buried treasure but becomes the treasure itself.

-Peter Eisenman

The Chikatsu-Asuka Historical Museum, Osaka, designed by Tadao Ando, is dedicated to exhibiting and researching artifacts of the Kofun and Asuka periods of Japanese culture, from the fourth to the seventh century A.D. The museum is located in a region containing over 200 burial mounds, or kofun, from that era, and there are a number of archaeological sites in the building's immediate neighborhood, which has been designated a historical park. As far as possible, then, Ando's design preserves the park's topography, altering it minimally through the use of architectural elements that serve more than one function: the building's roof doubles as sets of stairs leading up to an observation tower and plaza, together constituting stepped viewing platforms from which to look at the tombs in their natural surroundings. The concept focuses, Ando has said, "on architecture's power to produce a new landscape": like a large berm, the museum becomes an integral part of the landscape that the museum also serves to exhibit.

Inside the building, objects excavated from the burial mounds are exhibited in a darkened interior, evoking the interiors of the tombs in which they were discovered. Ando's use of concrete as a construction material recalls the work of Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, his architectural mentors, yet he combines this preference with a Japanese aesthetic of contrast-light and dark, interior and exterior, enclosed and expansive, hard and soft, nature and city, east and west. The subtle interplay of these opposites in Ando's buildings produces rich environments, and some of this is captured in the drawing: the hard-edged graphite lines marking the imposed, man-made structure offer a counterpoint to the softer shades of color depicting the enveloping landscape that Ando seeks to echo.

Publication excerpt from Matilda McQuaid, ed., Envisioning Architecture: Drawings from The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002, pp. 230-231.
Medium
Graphite and crayon with scoring on paper
Dimensions
11 5/8 x 33 1/8" (29.5 x 84.1 cm)
Credit
Gift of the architect
Object number
140.1993
Department
Architecture and Design

Installation views

We have identified these works in the following photos from our exhibition history.

How we identified these works

In 2018–19, MoMA collaborated with Google Arts & Culture Lab on a project using machine learning to identify artworks in installation photos. That project has concluded, and works are now being identified by MoMA staff.

If you notice an error, please contact us at [email protected].

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].