The Tokyo National Art Center is located in the Roppongi district of central Tokyo. Roppongi is a downtown area known for its many great restaurants, stores, foreign offices, and for being home to many artists. The building consists of seven huge column-free exhibition spaces of 2000 square meters each, a library, an amphitheater, a restaurant, a cafeteria and a museum store. The National Art Center in Tokyo has an area of 45,000 square meters, making it the largest museum in Japan.
The National Art Center is not a place for archiving artworks, but a place for open exhibitions and traveling exhibitions. The largest exhibition in Japan, the Nitten Exhibition, supported by the Nitten Japan Fine Arts Group, presents a collection of over 12,000 works each year. The evaluation process for this type of exhibition will begin in the basement, where works will be transported one by one to the loading area and only selected pieces will be transported by service elevator to the exhibition blocks.
Medium and small public exhibits will generally be done in “blocks” and will be judged, separated, selected and displayed as they are unloaded from the trucks in the basement at an operational rate. A display “block” can further be divided by compartments that create smaller spaces.
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This is the first super functional installation of its kind and we can rightly call it a giant display machine. Designed to rival the mechanical exhibition space, the atrium facade is huge, with transparent undulations.
As the trees surrounding the museum grow, they will surround the atrium with a wooded public space. Also in the patio area are two inverted cones, the top of which houses the restaurant and café. The atrium is connected to downtown Roppongi as part of the street, perhaps a part of Roppongi’s famous nightlife.
How to get to the museum
Hours: 10:00am – 6:00pm (Friday: 10:00am – 8:00pm) Closed: Sunday
Admission: Individual – ¥1,600 (adults), ¥1,200 (students), ¥800 (high school students) and Group – ¥1,400 (adults), ¥1000 (students), ¥600 (high school students).
Chiyoda Line Tokyo Metro Nogizaka Station Exit 6 is directly connected to the Center.
Hibiya Tokyo Subway or Toei Oedo Line Roppongi Station
7-22-2 Roppongi, Minato City, Tokyo 106-8558, Japan
