Sanaa, Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa

By Raymund Ryan - 8 January 2010

The buildings of Kazuyo Sejima are among the most emphatically beautiful in recent years. Working solo or in collaboration with Ryue Nishizawa, Sejima’s eye for the ethereal and delicate has resulted in wafer-thin structures that appear to defy gravity, climate and the mess of everyday life. They instigate games of transparency and porosity, reflectivity and refraction both on tight urban lots (Sejima’s Small House on a cul-de-sac in Aoyama, Tokyo, 2000) and in more pastoral settings in provincial Japan (the critically acclaimed 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, 2004). Sejima + Nishizawa and Associates (SANAA) is now building across Europe - Essen, Almere, Valencia, Basel - and in the United States. In Lower Manhattan, SANAA’s proposal for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, a small tower of stacked boxes, is under construction on the Bowery east of SoHo. But the Japanese duo’s first completed American building is in the comparatively minor city of Toledo, Ohio. It’s a pavilion for the display of a remarkable collection of glass objects and the accommodation of glass-blowing studios, most of which is ingeniously made visible to public view. The walls of the Glass Pavilion are made almost entirely of glass. Floor-to-ceiling panels of glass connect the floor plate and the miraculously thin white parapet above into one flush, contiguous surface. There are no obtrusive mullions to jar the illusion of transparency and a floating roof. And corners curve in plan so that the figure of the building is never fixed. It soon becomes apparent that there are further walls of glass within the glazed perimeter, boxes or volumes of light hovering inside this world that seems caught between solidity and a state of fluidity - a nimble allusion to the nature of glass itself. The pavilion is found across a broad street from its mother institution, the Toledo Museum of Art, a neo-classical edifice from the early 20th century set off by a grand flight of steps and a tall...