When the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art opened in Kanazawa in 2004, anyone arriving from any direction met a wall of glass. The museum is a circle about 113 metres in diameter, low, transparent, crossed by corridors that can be entered from every side. There is no monumental entrance, no hierarchy between front and back, and from outside you see people moving between the galleries as in an aquarium. The project won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale that same year. It is signed by Kazuyo Sejima (b. 1956) and Ryue Nishizawa (b. 1966): SANAA.
Sejima trained in the studio of Toyo Ito, and shares his attention to a light architecture, conceived as an interface between people and environment. She founded her own studio in 1987; Nishizawa, ten years younger, joined as a collaborator, and in 1995 the two founded SANAA (Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates). Nishizawa also continues to sign projects of his own, such as the Moriyama House in Tokyo. In 2010 they received the Pritzker Prize together.
The method: a hundred models to remove one element
The image is one of lightness; the method is one of dogged persistence. For each project the studio produces hundreds of scale study models: not to refine a form, but to test whether a column, a wall, a thickness can be eliminated without the whole collapsing. The columns are extremely slender steel tubes, often only a few centimetres in diameter, which at Kanazawa hold up the roof and at Essen hold up the floors. The slabs are thin. The glass walls have almost invisible mullions. What remains is the structure reduced to the necessary minimum, and this minimum is studied with the same precision with which other studios draw ornament.
A slab that undulates: the Rolex Learning Center
In 2010 SANAA completed in Lausanne, on the EPFL campus, the Rolex Learning Center: a library, a study space, a service centre for students. It has no superimposed floors. It is a single concrete slab of about 120 by 160 metres that rises and falls in gentle hills, with circular patios open to the sky, and beneath it a continuous space with no doors and no dividing walls. To build it, the slab was cast in place on curved formwork calculated to the millimetre. The result is a building in which changing level means walking uphill, as on a slope. The library is a landscape.
The idea is that a space with no internal boundaries produces different behaviours: students sit on the slopes, work in groups where needed, move around without crossing thresholds. Not all users are convinced: without walls noise travels, and the curves make furnishing difficult. SANAA accepts the price, as always, in the name of a principle: a public space must be crossable by anyone, in any direction.
The limit of transparency
The most frequent criticism is that SANAA's architecture is more beautiful to photograph than to inhabit. Glass heats up in summer, smooth surfaces hold nothing, the absence of detail makes the buildings mute and, when they are used intensely, a little inhospitable. SANAA's implicit answer is that the architect's task is not to fill space but to prepare it: it is up to those who use it to give it character. It is a position consistent with the Japanese tradition of the void, the ma, and it has a practical consequence: SANAA's best buildings are those in which use is intense, and the void is filled by real activity. The busiest museums work better than the deserted ones.