An Art Museum designed under an entirely new concept inside the Izu Granpal Park near Ito city in Shizuoka. Where as a regular museum of modern art takes up art as far back as 1945, this museum focuses on the 1990’s. 10 artists were invited from every corner of the world yearly in the last decade of this century to hold one-man exhibitions. All or a part of the exhibits were added to the permanent collection. The nature being simultaneously that of a museum of the fin-de-siecle and the future, the museum itself was structured to embrace these activities.
The facility is a composite of three basic parts; the special guest houses, the repository and exhibition spaces and the gallery. The special guest house section is where the level is highest in the site and includes the special exhibition spaces, the curator and administration section and the guest houses. It is arranged in a Greek cross with a rotunda spatial format. It is like a guesthouse as well as an Italian villa. Connected to it by a corridor rimming a 50 meter square pond are the repository and exhibition spaces which is used to house and display the annual collections. Composed of simple post tension beams and unit skylights, it is a museum of storage. Here, along the ridge looking down on the sea are scattered 10 galleries corresponding to 10 artists. These galleries have a loft-like nature, meaning they vary in size, proportion, ceiling height and lighting to diversify the possibilities of the installations. The visitors can wander about the various spaces and experience contemporary art whilst enjoying the natural scenery.