Gallery Chiisaime (ギャラリー小さい芽)

The great earthquake of 1995 left an empty plot where the owner's house had stood. Rebuilding the house alone would not have been enough for him, so the couple decided to put up a place serving art and culture in the Shukugawa district, one that would also be a "memorial monument" so that the disaster would not fade from memory. They turned to Tadao Ando, who came to see the site on 3 April 1995; on 17 May, at his office, the owner was shown the plans and a white model of the building. The ground-purification ceremony took place on 9 January 1996; after some eight months of building work, the gallery opened on 16 September 1996.

Ando himself named it Chiisaime (小さい芽, "little sprout"), wishing it to grow. He gave it a white object, a monument carrying hopes of rebirth and reconstruction, along with its logo and a stamp made from one of his drawings. In 1999 the gallery was one of the twenty buildings by his office where the exhibition "20 Processes" told, on site, the story of each one. It received Nishinomiya's urban landscape award in 1997 and, in 2001, the Camphor Tree architectural culture prize (くすのき建築文化賞).

On the ground floor, bare concrete walls enclose a calm space and a courtyard where sunlight filters through the leaves: an exhibition space quite unlike that of the two upper levels. There a void rises through both levels, daylight pours in, and the interior changes in appearance as the hours pass. A camphor tree grows in the courtyard and can also be seen from the first-floor terrace; for the gallery it is a symbol of the reconstruction, and it grows along with it.

The gallery hosts exhibitions, small concerts, talks, workshops and tea ceremonies; its ground floor can be hired as an exhibition space. From 1996 to 2005 it held a yearly exhibition of drawings by Nishinomiya primary-school children, organised as part of the post-earthquake reconstruction: ten editions in all.

The gallery is open during exhibitions; outside them it is normally closed, and visitors should get in touch or book ahead. It lies near Shukugawa station (Hankyū line) and Sakura-Shukugawa station (JR).