Sumida Hokusai Museum: Kazuyo Sejima's Monolith of the Master

Why is it significant?

Stand before the mesmerizing, futuristic facade of the Sumida Hokusai Museum, gleaming like an angular monolith clad in subtly mirrored aluminum panels that reflect the passing clouds and surrounding rooftops.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand before the mesmerizing, futuristic facade of the Sumida Hokusai Museum, gleaming like an angular monolith clad in subtly mirrored aluminum panels that reflect the passing clouds and surrounding rooftops. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Kazuyo Sejima and completed in twenty-sixteen, the building features dramatic triangular fissures cut through its volume, allowing natural daylight to illuminate open pedestrian breezeways that welcome the neighborhood inside.

Katsushika Hokusai, the world's most famous ukiyo-e woodblock master, was born right in this Honjo-Sumida district in seventeen sixty and lived nearly his entire ninety-year life within a two-kilometer radius of this spot, moving houses more than ninety times and changing his artistic pseudonym over thirty times throughout his obsessive creative career. The building's reflective aluminum skin mirrors the daily rhythms and shifting seasonal colors of the surrounding shitamachi neighborhood.

Step inside the high-tech exhibition galleries to behold flawless original prints and digital interactive archives of Hokusai's greatest masterpieces, including The Great Wave off Kanagawa and Red Fuji from his iconic series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Hokusai's dynamic compositions, expressive line work, and bold Prussian blue pigments revolutionized Western Impressionist masters including Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Vincent van Gogh. Digital interactive exhibits allow visitors to zoom into the intricate details of woodblock prints and examine Hokusai's revolutionary brushstrokes.

In the permanent gallery sits a startlingly lifelike animatronic model of the elderly Hokusai and his artist daughter Oei at work in their cluttered Edo studio: Hokusai sits on a straw mat hunched over a paper scroll, his brush hand visibly trembling with creative intensity. The surrounding public park provides a playful outdoor environment where children play within sight of Hokusai's museum. The surrounding public park provides a playful outdoor environment where children play within sight of Hokusai's museum.

Walk south through the residential streets for four blocks until you reach the walled corner of the historic Kira Estate.