Revisiting the city of Edo and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo : unlimited organisms, between reason and emotion

Abstract

At the beginning of the Edo period (1603-1867), the city of Edo in Japan, which corresponds today to the central area of Tokyo, was the object of a profound urban transformation that was deemed necessary because of the city’s new condition as the country’s political and military center. Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616), the first Shogun of the Edo period and a mentor for said transformation, devised a system of moats that spiraled outwards from Edo Castle and was to continue growing. Today, Tokyo is the city with the largest urban area in the world. In that city, the National Museum of Western Art, designed by Le Corbusier (1887-1965) in 1955 and completed in 1959, was based on the Musée à Croissance Illimitée [Museum of Unlimited Growth], an unrealized proposal the architect had presented in 1939. That museum was organized around a square-shaped nucleus, around which exhibition galleries built on pilotis could be added successively and without limit. This idea of the possible growth of the Tokyo museum was abandoned early on, but the Musée proposal continues to be pertinent. Recognizing the fact that they share structural principles based on possible unlimited growth, this paper proposes revisiting Edo and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, setting out a discussion of the respective creations as organisms that balance reason and emotion.