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

A building made for pottery

The Former Tokoname City Ceramic Art Institute Main Building (旧常滑市立陶芸研究所本館), the main hall of what is now the Tokoname Tounomori Ceramic Art Institute in Tokoname City, Aichi Prefecture, is a reinforced concrete structure completed in 1961 and listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 7 August 2023.

The money came from a gift. Ina Chōzaburō (1890 to 1980), who founded the tile and sanitary ware firm Ina Seito, later LIXIL, and served as Tokoname's first mayor, handed the city 150,000 shares in his own company so that the town's potters would have a place to study. The main building and the studios were put up with that money, and the institute opened in October 1961.

The architect was Horiguchi Sutemi (1895 to 1984). He started out in 1920 with the Bunriha Kenchiku Kai, the Japanese Secession group, and was among the first to bring Dutch architecture to a Japanese readership. He went on to work as a scholar of traditional Japanese building and of the Chashitsu, publishing widely and feeding what he found back into his own drawings. The Tokoname commission comes from that later stretch of his career.

The building has two storeys above ground and one below, with a footprint of 203 square meters, and enters the register as a single building. Research on Tokoname ware was the original work here. Today the place functions mainly as a training school, and its galleries hold large storage jars from the late Heian and Kamakura periods alongside pieces by named potters of the Edo period and after.

Why it was registered

The register number is 23-0587, from the 105th round of registrations. The criterion applied was the one covering works that serve as a model of design. The main gate at the entrance to the same grounds was registered the same day under number 23-0588, and Tokoname City announced the two together.

What the listing recognises in the Former Tokoname City Ceramic Art Institute Main Building is the form of the thing itself. Purple tile covers the outer walls. Balconies and deep eaves push forward from them, and the horizontal lines they draw hold the whole facade together. The two halves do not mirror each other. The vocabulary is postwar modernist, yet the way daylight is dropped in from overhead, and the way colour is chosen, come from a designer who had spent years inside the study of older Japanese buildings.

Use and form are not separated here either. The place was drawn as a gallery and as a school at the same time. Many trainees have passed through since it opened, some of them now working abroad.

What to look at

Light coming down from the roof

Step into the gallery of the Former Tokoname City Ceramic Art Institute Main Building and you lose track, for a moment, of where the light is entering. It is not the windows. Horiguchi wanted daylight to reach the exhibits evenly through the whole day, so he made the roof planes that project on all four sides of the rooftop triangular. Light passing through ribbed glass strikes the underside of the roof, scatters there, and works its way into the room below. The glazing is not the only aperture. The roof as a whole distributes the light.

Rooms defined by colour

The stair hall divides the plan. West of it lie the top-lit galleries; east of it are the offices and meeting rooms. Red and gold were used in the reception room, and one gallery is finished in silver. Set against the purple tile outside, the scheme makes it clear that colour is doing the work of separating one room's character from another. This is where the designer's hand shows most plainly.

The tea room

There is a Chashitsu inside the building. Horiguchi wrote extensively on tea architecture, so this is his scholarly subject placed under the same roof as his modernist one. The institute lists it among the things to see, together with the triangular rooftop forms and the gold, silver and purple interiors.

Standing in the stair hall

The stair hall that splits gallery from office is the spine of the plan. Vertical movement and lateral sorting are both handled at this one point. Pause on the landing and look up. From there you can read where the light from the roof lights actually lands.

Visiting

The Tokoname Tounomori Ceramic Art Institute is open to the public and admission is free. Opening hours run from 9:00 to 17:00. It closes on Mondays, and when a Monday falls on a public holiday the closure moves to the following day. It also closes over the New Year period.

Groups, and anyone who would like a staff member to walk them through the building, should book ahead using the visit request form on the institute's website. The training studios on the same grounds can be seen at any time by people considering the training programme.

The institute does not publish a general photography rule for visitors on its website, so it is worth asking at reception before taking pictures in the galleries. The exterior and the main gate are visible from outside the property line, and looking at them from the street does not depend on opening days.

From Meitetsu Tokoname Station the ride is 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. Drivers reach the site roughly 3 minutes from the Shinsegibashi Higashi intersection on National Route 247, and there is parking. The telephone number is 0569-35-3970.

The training studios stand on the same grounds. The Tounomori museum building sits apart from them, over in Segi-chō. Anyone coming specifically for the Former Tokoname City Ceramic Art Institute Main Building should head for the Okujo 7-chome side.