A Critical View: The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa

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...