Former Tokoname City Ceramic Art Institute (Tokoname Tounomori Ceramic Art Institute) Main Gate

A gate built from concrete block

The Former Tokoname City Ceramic Art Institute Main Gate (旧常滑市立陶芸研究所正門), the entrance to what is now the Tokoname Tounomori Ceramic Art Institute in Tokoname City, Aichi Prefecture, is a concrete block gate built in 1961 and listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 7 August 2023.

The gate opening measures 5.0 meters across, and the run of wall attached to it brings the total length to 11 meters. It enters the register as a single structure, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs files it not as a building but under other constructed works. The gate stands on the register in its own right, separately from the hall behind it.

The designer was Horiguchi Sutemi (1895 to 1984), the architect of the main building on the same grounds, who drew gate and hall as one piece of work. Horiguchi was also a scholar of traditional Japanese architecture and of the tea room, a field in which the treatment of gates and thresholds carries a good deal of weight. Choosing concrete block, then a new and frankly industrial product, for the entrance to a pottery institute was a decision made with that background behind it.

Why it was registered

The register number is 23-0588, from the 105th round of registrations. The criterion applied was the one covering works that serve as a model of design, and the main building was listed the same day under number 23-0587. Tokoname City announced the pair together.

The Former Tokoname City Ceramic Art Institute Main Gate earned its own listing because leaf, wall and lettering were designed as a single object. The ironwork that lets the gate open, the wall that separates inside from outside, and the sign that names the institution are normally handled by three different trades at three different moments. Here they were settled at once.

Then there is the material. Concrete block spread through Japan after the war as a cheap, quick, unglamorous product, not one anyone reached for when they wanted ornament. Stacking it as a fixed dimensional unit and raising it into a symmetrical wall was itself the design act. There is something worth pausing over, too, in the fact that the entrance to an institution devoted to clay and fire was built from cement units rather than from tile or fired ceramic panels.

What to look at

Seven characters punched out of a board

A long horizontal board spans the top of the gate. Cut through it are the seven characters reading Tokoname Tōgei Kenkyūjo, the Tokoname Ceramic Art Institute, in an extra-bold Mincho typeface. They are not painted on and not applied as separate pieces. The shapes have been punched out of the board, so daylight passes through the counters of each character. Extra-bold Mincho carries a wide contrast between its vertical and horizontal strokes, which in a cut-out reverses the usual reading: the thin strokes survive as lines while the thick ones become openings. It behaves less like signage than like a structure in the shape of writing. Stand square in front of it and look up.

The sliding iron lattice

The leaves are made of iron lattice and slide left and right to open, across a 5.0 meter opening. Because they are lattice rather than plate, the grounds stay visible when the gate is shut and the frame stays legible when it is open. That is why closing time does not turn the boundary into a blank wall.

Walls set back at right angles

From either side of the opening the concrete block walls turn a right angle and step back from the street. The two sides mirror each other. Instead of running flat along the road, the wall folds, which leaves a small pocket of space in front of the gate and pushes the leaves into shallow recess. The 11 meter figure in the register covers these returns as well as the gate itself.

Through the opening

Pass through and the purple-tiled main building appears straight ahead. The view narrows at the Former Tokoname City Ceramic Art Institute Main Gate and then releases, which is how the sequence was built. Walking it in that order, gate first and hall second, makes the intention easier to read.

Visiting

The Former Tokoname City Ceramic Art Institute Main Gate faces the street and can be seen from outside the property at any hour. The lettering and the block walls are all readable from the public road, so a visit aimed only at the gate does not have to fall on an opening day.

Going through the gate to see the exhibits in the main building means working to the institute's hours. The Tokoname Tounomori Ceramic Art Institute opens 9:00 to 17:00 and admission is free. It closes on Mondays, moving the closure to Tuesday when a Monday is a public holiday, and it closes over the New Year period. Groups, and anyone who would like a staff member to guide them, should book ahead through the visit request form on the institute's website.

No general photography rule for visitors is published on the institute's website. The gate stands outdoors and can be photographed from the road, but for the galleries inside it is worth asking at reception first.

From Meitetsu Tokoname Station the trip takes about 5 minutes by taxi or about 30 minutes on foot. By bus, take a service bound for Chita Handa Station, get off at INAX Live Museum Mae and walk about 7 minutes. By car it is roughly 3 minutes from the Shinsegibashi Higashi intersection on National Route 247, with parking on site. The telephone number is 0569-35-3970.