The extended Naito family could not have imagined that their family coat of arms would one day become the symbol of a city and then also the recognition mark of their new museum. The samurai clan ruled in the mountainous area east of Nagoya, precisely the area in central Japan that is now considered the nation’s industrial heartland. The city of the same name now has its headquarters in the city of Toyota, one of the largest in the world and at the same time symbolizing the Japanese striving for perfection in every detail. As the car factories grew, the city of Toyota, with a population of 420,000, also grew in size and prosperity. The lively trade tax allowed the construction and furnishing of an elegant art museum in 1995, designed by Japan’s best museum architect, Yoshio Taniguchi, who died last week. The cool elegance of the museum building was a letter of recommendation from the master builder, who was only allowed to expand the MoMA in New York a short time later. The car company maintains its own museum. Right next to Taniguchi’s museum, another “Haku-butsukan” (museum) has now been inaugurated, the architecture of which is very different from that of its neighbor: The Municipal Museum, designed by Shigeru Ban from Tokyo, contrasts the cool Toyota Museum of Art with warm, wooden architecture, its creator This year it was awarded one of the most important architectural prizes in the world, the “Praemium Imperiale” (F.A.Z. from September 13th). The city’s formative industrial history is hardly mentioned in the new museum, because the dominant company Toyota maintains its own museum . The city owes its rise to the entrepreneurial skills of Kiichiro Toyoda, who – when local silk production was in crisis at the beginning of the 1930s – switched from loom production to engine production and thus laid the foundation for a global corporation. A sculpture garden connects two eras. Ban has positioned his new building in this way , that together with the neighboring art museum it forms a long barrier that shields the museum park from a nearby elevated railway line. Towards the city, the proportions of the facades are similar, while on the garden side the landscape architecture unites the two locations. Peter Walker, the famous Berkeley landscape architect, designed the new garden with ginkgo trees and cypresses and terrain jumps. His sculpture garden now cleverly connects two buildings and eras. An open, 90-meter-long hall called “En-nichi” (festive space) is the public center of the city museum and perhaps the entire city. The pattern of the wooden roof represents the city emblem of Toyota City. The roof rests on tall, tapered, star-shaped supports, also built from local cedar. Hydrogen engines are exhibited in the En-nichi, and there is also seating made of cardboard tubes, designed by Ban. Artifacts of everyday life. On the forecourt, the cantilevered roof shows a circular skylight in the criss-cross support structure. When the sun shines through the skylight at midday on the summer solstice, the wooden beams cast a shadow on the ground in the shape of the city’s coat of arms; an Architecture parlante is created from two V-shaped arrows, the hexagram of the seal. The center of the permanent exhibition: the huge multi-story glass display caseHiroyuki HiraiThe museum’s collection in Toyota consists mostly of everyday objects, including telephones and video games from the Showa period. These exhibits are displayed in a huge, multi-story glass display case in the center of the permanent exhibition hall. This large exhibition shelf in the middle of the room, in which artifacts are presented, is both a display depot and a cabinet of curiosities, and it serves as earthquake protection. Along a gently curved ramp, a ribbon of windows with panoramic views of the Mikawa Mountains and a bamboo grove leads to the upper floor. Ban’s new building is Japan’s first museum to receive the “Net Zero Energy Label”. However, a row of white oak trees was felled for the new building and a school was demolished. The building is not quite as ecological as Ban’s architecture is. Minimalism has a long tradition in Japan. However, the real treasure of the new museum campus in Toyota is the Doji-en tea house in the garden of the two museums. Designed by Taniguchi, it testifies that minimalism, clean lines and flexible use of space have a long tradition in Japan and do not need to be reinvented. The traditional wooden building is hidden behind a high hedge, its windows look out onto a fine moss garden. For the provincial town of Toyota, the building is nevertheless the beginning of a new era. It was not until 1951 that the place, then called Koromo, was given city status and soon changed its name. It was not until 1979 that a private railway line opened up the industrial city. Toyota still has difficulty retaining foreign employees because the city lacks attractions. The top-class museums demonstrate the ambition to change that. Because Toyota is still the largest city in Japan that is not connected to the national railway network – a car city. Architecture that shows a new beginning Toyota may be a remarkably ugly city even by Japanese standards, but with the new museum it is Ban – as before in his new construction of the Center Pompidou in Metz – an architecture that testifies to a new beginning that would also suit other withering car cities such as Wolfsburg and especially Detroit. For the museum’s curator, Yoshimi Yamada, the rediscovery of wood as a load-bearing building material and the conception of the museum as a third place for citizens are an asset that she and her employer are profiting from.More on the topicThe internal company competition never sleeps: At the foot of the Fuji-san, on the site of the former Higashi-Fuji factory in Susono, which was closed after only twenty years of operation, Toyota has built a model city district in which assistance systems for elderly people, wooden buildings and hydrogen fuel cells are tested. The “Woven City” is a “living laboratory” for residents and researchers who test and further develop robotics, mobility, and smart home systems. People, buildings and vehicles are digitally connected to each other and communicate via data and sensors. The design for the new town at the foot of Japan’s sacred mountain comes from the successful Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. Equipped with in-home robotics, sensor-based AI is designed to check the health of residents while zero-emission vehicles whir around on the streets. 360 Toyota employees and their families and retired couples who have agreed to have their data collected as in a large-scale experiment are currently moving into the “Woven City”. The name of the “woven city” is an allusion on the founding business of the group, which once manufactured looms, in Toyota. The geometric patterns of the new museum in Toyota City appear like an additional reference to the origins of the “mobility group”.
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