ABSTRACT
The most experienced of these, Maki is inclined to the idea that “... the present is the very flower of modernism.”3 His is an architecture of our global era. The scale of his work is large, sized for the busloads of tourists brought to the site each day and to the symbolic role of the museum in the region. Nonetheless, the power of place drove his design: the looming Kitayama range resonated with Maki’s intellectual appreciation of oku. He argued, “The interest of the Japanese in the subtlest contours of the land is grounded in a strong, perhaps abnormal, attachment ... attachment to the land remains very much alive, even within completely modern socio-economic institutions.”4 Maki is fully engaged with a meaningful vernacular landscape and it was in the landscape designed by his protégé, Toru Mitani, and in his own mountain-like museum that Maki most strongly acknowledged the
past invested in this place. Outside, the two designers acknowledged the kunibiki myth, carved in a path slashing through the site; few will miss the green magatama marker at the door – but mostly Maki inclined to rusting Cor-ten finish instead of form to make his point. Early on, he asserted, “... it is possible for us to express time by means of materials ...”5 Maki’s expressions of past and place in the landscape of the Museum of Ancient Izumo increasingly give way to a lighter, modern architecture, one that relies on glass cases from Germany and glowing custom furniture for effect.
