Tokugawa Art Museum South Storehouse

What the Tokugawa Art Museum South Storehouse Is

The Tokugawa Art Museum South Storehouse (徳川美術館南収蔵庫) is a collection store in Tokugawacho, Higashi-ku, Nagoya City, completed in 1935 and entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property (structure) in 1997. It stands against the west side of the museum's Main Building and was built to hold the collection rather than to show it.

The structure is reinforced concrete, 2 stories, with a building area of 250 square meters. The roof is a Kirizuma-zukuri gable laid with Hongawarabuki round-and-flat tiles. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record notes that the walls carry almost no openings and conceal the posts and beams behind them.

Design and construction followed the same path as the Main Building. Working drawings were prepared by Yoshimoto Yoshio from the winning competition entry, and Takenaka Corporation built it. At 506 square meters for the Main Building and 250 for the Tokugawa Art Museum South Storehouse, the site was divided roughly 2 to 1 between showing objects and keeping them.

Why the Tokugawa Art Museum South Storehouse Was Registered

The criterion applied to the Tokugawa Art Museum South Storehouse is that the building is a model of its type in form and design. Its registration number is 23-0004, from the third round of registrations under the system, and it was registered on 12 June 1997, the same day as the adjoining Main Building (23-0003).

What earns the recognition is that the storage function became the architecture. Leaving out windows was a decision made to protect objects from light and humidity, and the blank wall planes that resulted sit comfortably against the heavy treatment of the Main Building. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record makes the same point, describing the two buildings as joined and composing a single weighty exterior.

A store is the part of a museum that visitors are least likely to see. Registering it on equal footing with the display wing says something about how the pair was understood: not as one building plus an outbuilding, but as a working museum of the 1930s. A purpose-built reinforced concrete store on the site from the opening year in 1935 is part of what makes the Tokugawa Art Museum South Storehouse worth attention.

What to Look For at the Tokugawa Art Museum South Storehouse

Anyone hunting for ornament on the Tokugawa Art Museum South Storehouse will come away empty-handed. The wall runs on with almost nothing to interrupt it.

That absence is the point. No post outlines, no beam lines break the surface. Only the roof carries any pitch, a Kirizuma-zukuri gable under heavy Hongawarabuki tiling. Round tiles capping the joints between flat ones give a deeper shadow than the lighter pantiles used on ordinary roofs. With the walls saying nothing, the ridge line does the work of drawing the building.

The junction with the Main Building repays a look. The two run together without a visible break, one made to bring people in, the other made to keep them out, yet from outside they read as a single run of tiled roof and thick wall.

The 2 stories are worth a thought as well. Splitting the volume into floors rather than stacking shelves higher affects how objects are moved and checked. Note also that 250 square meters is the building's footprint, not its floor area, so the usable storage inside is larger than that figure suggests.

Visiting the Tokugawa Art Museum South Storehouse

The Tokugawa Art Museum South Storehouse is a working store and its interior is closed to the public. There is no visitor route through it, and buying a ticket does not change that. Since it joins the Main Building, as the Agency for Cultural Affairs record describes, what you can take in is the exterior as one continuous elevation with the display wing.

To see the Main Building galleries you need a museum ticket. Opening hours are 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with last admission at 4:30 p.m., and the museum closes on Mondays; when a Monday is a public holiday or substitute holiday, the closure shifts to the next weekday. Admission covers the museum and the Nagoya City Hosa Library: 2,000 yen for adults, 1,200 yen for high school and university students, free for elementary and junior high school students.

Photography with a smartphone, tablet, or compact camera is permitted in the galleries. Some works are excluded, and notices at the gallery entrances say which.

The nearest station is Ozone on the JR Chuo Line, about 10 minutes on foot from the south exit. From Ozone on the Meijo subway line, exit E5 leaves about a 15 minute walk. City and Meitetsu buses stop at Tokugawaen Shindeki, roughly 3 minutes away.