21_21 DESIGN SIGHT

Design museum and research centre founded by Issey Miyake and opened in March 2007 inside Tokyo Midtown's Midtown Garden, with architecture by Tadao Ando and a curatorial brief to make visitors look at everyday objects as design problems. The institution exists because Miyake spent years arguing in print that Japan, a country exporting design at industrial scale, had no museum devoted to it. Set expectations accordingly: there is no permanent collection and no designer retrospective on rotation. Shows are built around a theme, and past subjects have run to chocolate, water, rice, and the mechanics of measurement. Ando took Miyake's A Piece of Cloth principle literally and built the roof as one folded sheet of steel. Directors and programme partners have included the graphic designer Taku Satoh and product designer Naoto Fukasawa; Gallery 3, carved out of a decommissioned restaurant beside the entrance, opened on 31 March 2017 for the tenth anniversary. Typical hours run 10:00 to 19:00 with last entry at 18:30; closed Tuesdays, New Year holidays, and installation periods between exhibitions. Admission varies by show. Reach it on foot from Roppongi (Toei Oedo / Tokyo Metro Hibiya) or Nogizaka (Chiyoda) in about five minutes. The numbers explain the strange first impression: roughly 80 percent of the building sits below grade, the roof is a single 54-metre steel plate, and the whole place holds only three galleries totalling under 700 square metres. It is small on purpose and it rewards slow looking rather than a survey walk.