Tokyo Art Museum

The museum began with a road. A town-planning scheme of 1962 provided for a 16 m wide road cutting diagonally across the long plots of a single family in Sengawa; the decision to build it came in 1990, a year after an inheritance had been opened whose duties weighed heavily on that land. Rather than sell the remaining plots off piece by piece, the woman who would found the museum sought to develop both sides of the future road in a unified way.

Ando recalls first visiting Sengawa in 1994, four years after that decision. His client then wanted a mixed complex centred on housing, on plots divided by the road. He accepted at once and began studying how a streetscape forms, but this first project was abandoned for various reasons. She did not give up: her persistence drew in private developers and the city of Chofu, and led to a "street" project far broader than the original one.

The Tokyo Art Museum opened in October 2004. In June 2007 it hosted an Ando exhibition titled "街が生まれる―仙川" ("A Town Is Born: Sengawa"). The street itself ended up being called "Ando Street" (安藤ストリート) without anyone having decided it.

The museum is not a freestanding building: it is one of the buildings of "Ando Street", where the architect's constructions face each other across a road lined with flowering dogwoods. Its exhibition space takes its particular form from this overall scheme, which reworks both sides of the road to a single design; it is tied to the neighbouring theatre, a nursery, housing and the restaurants that rent space there.

The museum is an exhibition venue: over time it shows works by Japanese and foreign artists, and closes while exhibitions are being changed.

The museum is open Thursday to Sunday, from 11:00 to 18:30 (last entry at 18:00). It is closed on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, over the year-end holidays, during the summer break, between exhibitions and for maintenance: outside exhibition periods it stays closed.

Address: 1-25-1 Sengawacho, Chofu (Tokyo), postcode 182-0002. It is a 4-minute walk from Sengawa station, on the Keio line.