Kii-Fudoki-no-Oka Matsushita Memorial Museum

A Modernist Museum beside the Iwase-Senzuka Tombs

The Kii-Fudoki-no-Oka Matsushita Memorial Museum (紀伊風土記の丘松下記念資料館) is a museum building of 1971, altered in 2001 in Iwase, Wakayama City, Wakayama Prefecture, and was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property (structure) on February 17, 2022 (Agency for Cultural Affairs).

The Agency records a single-storey reinforced-concrete building with a basement, covering 1,593 square metres; registration number 30-0318.

A Museum beside the Burial Mounds

The Matsushita Memorial Museum of Kii-Fudoki-no-Oka is a reinforced-concrete museum designed by Urabe Shizutaro beside a group of burial mounds (Agency for Cultural Affairs). Earth banks and similar devices keep its required volume low in appearance.

Heavily chamfered pilasters, drip moulds shaped like nageshi beams, walls faced in blue schist and window grilles with bronze-bell patterns draw on ancient sources, so that a modernist building blends into the landscape (Agency for Cultural Affairs).

Why It Was Registered

The Agency registered it as a model of design, a modernist museum that blends into the landscape.

What to Look For

Look for the blue schist walls and the bronze-bell pattern of the window grilles (Agency for Cultural Affairs).

Visiting

Under the Wakayama Prefecture rules for Kii-Fudoki-no-Oka, it is open from 9:00 to 16:30 and closed on Mondays (the next weekday when Monday is a holiday) and from December 29 to January 3. The rules give no admission fee.