Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum’s current building was completed in September 1975. Its design is by Mayekawa Kunio Associates (currently, Mayekawa Associates, Architects & Engineers). MAYEKAWA Kunio, one of Japan’s great modern architects, placed emphasis on providing open spaces, lobbies, and restaurants when designing public buildings. Mayekawa sought to give visitors to his buildings a feeling of urban enjoyment, and he used architecture to engender comfortable urban spaces.

The critic, Shuichi Kato, once wrote: “Tokyo streets have no order. MAYEKAWA Kunio has consistently tried to produce small urban spaces in this chaotic context, through his arrangement of plural building volumes on the site. The courtyards and voids within the building’s walls perform not only as passageways but as open spaces to breath, relax, meet people, and talk. His buildings, this is to say, contain harmonious urban spaces on a reduced scale.”

The current museum building incorporates three functions: (1) a permanent and thematic exhibition function (i.e. holding thematic exhibitions), (2) an exhibit function for art groups (i.e. holding public entry exhibitions), and (3) a cultural activities function (i.e. holding educational outreach programs). In terms of site conditions, the museum was allotted less building area than even the original building due to a scenic zone law restricting building height to 15m height and other park laws. Despite this, planning called for a floor area nearly double (31,000㎡) that of the original building (17,000㎡). As a result, nearly 60% of the total floor area had to be placed underground.

In response to these site conditions and the fore-mentioned three required functions, Mayekawa Kunio Associates established a broad open space in the middle and arranged a separate thematic/permanent exhibitions block, public entry exhibition block, and cultural activities block around it to create his basic composition.

Mayekawa then also established three themes to guide the design: “(1) providing a “quiet, neutral” backdrop for the exhibited works, (2) maintaining connection with the exterior environment, and (3) using materials and construction methods that ensure optimal durability and thereby ‘produce remarkable results by means of ordinary materials.’” (Excerpt from the “Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum Basic Design Explanation”). On this basis, he worked out the concrete design details.

These three themes served as indices for the entire project from the preliminary design and final design stage, through the design and supervision stage, to building completion. Theme (2), furthermore, ensured that the building would be carefully laid out to maintain connection with the large gingko trees, elms, and zelkova trees forming the wooded areas of Ueno Park.

The main floor and entrance hall are established on the B1 level, and the design develops centripetally from esplanades surrounding the separate function blocks—the public entry exhibition block, thematic exhibition block, and cultural activities block—to the open space of the B1 floor. This arrangement gives the interior a close connection with the exterior spaces of the park and, furthermore, provides users with a clear path of movement through the museum.