In the extreme abstraction and perfect clarity of its spatial organization and its material assemblage, SANAA’s new building in Kanazawa is like a prototypical diagram of the ideal contemporary art museum: an iconic enclosure containing “white cube” galleries of various sizes, with secondary functions in the interstices. The architecture itself is reduced to the fewest possible tectonic elements, comprising flat surfaces with a minimum of articulation at their junctions. Even so, it seems that the radically reductive approach to detailing in SANAA’s earlier work – prioritizing visually immaculate connections ahead of longevity – has given way to a more pragmatic attitude toward issues such as waterproofing and insulation, causing a noticeable thickening of the joints. Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa