ron mueck’s ’standing woman’, a super realistic sculpture of a wan village woman, at a scale two and a half times as large as normal, glances down at you, in a space perfectly scaled for it. everything else recedes, you get an unnerving sensation, like some larger-than-life proto-mother figure silently questioning you. walking to the next room, your view takes you through a gap to some houses outside. their domestic presence, their normal scale, brings you back: a brechtian moment.

the modern art museum experience used to be all about going into a large windowless building, moving through room after room of artworks lit with some diffused daylight from above.

ryue nishizawa’s twist at towada art center is simple yet radical: a series of rooms, each specifically dimensioned to house a specific artwork, strung together by a glass corridor. in between are outdoor spaces for outdoor artworks.

this design strategy particularly works in this small remote city. rooms are scaled like small buildings along the main street. all exterior walls are in the some kind of fibre-plastic, making the buildings look as banal as temporary construction site offices. walking or driving past, some artworks can be seen through glazed facades. once you get inside, walking around, inside and outside feelings are mixed. occasionally, you look at the city in between white buildings. in the cafe cum gift shop, the ceiling is so tall and the glass facing the street so immense that you feel very close to the street. you feel the art center merging with the city, a part of the city, where inside and outside are one and the same. in fact, there is a plan to join some art and cultural spaces along this main street together, turning this part of the city into an open museum: the street as corridor, joining inside and outside art spaces.

beatriz colomina commented in LOG 15 winter 2009 issue that in both corbusier and mies, their ideas for a museum and their ideas for a house are one and the same. specifically, she was talking about corbusier’s endless museum and villa savoye; and mies’ house for helen resor and ‘museum for a small city’; that the idea of the museum contains the idea of the domestic; that the inside is an also an unfolding outside, or the outside is thought of as an inside.

this is not so surprising or significant, if we talk about architecture at the level of ideas, since architects often use a similar set of ideas for different projects. after all, these ideas all find home in their heads. kanazawa 21st century museum may become moriyama house, moriyama house may become towada art center, towada art center may become house for the nanjing cipea. they may seem similar, but each is a specific response to the context it sits in, through careful manipulation of scale, distances, orientation, and organization, i.e. concrete dimensions of architecture as experienced by the human body.