At some point in the future, the new Sumida Hokusai Museum in Tokyo will be considered with great affection by a lot of people. Like Tokyo Tower and Starck's Asahi Beer Hall — which have had their fair share of criticism but are now an inextricable part of what makes Tokyo one of the world's kookiest cities — the asymmetric jumble of silvery blocks designed by celebrated architect Kazuyo Sejima will one day be taken into people's hearts — probably.
We're not there yet though. The most blackly comic criticism of the museum I've come across is, "We had to suffer the Kanto Earthquake, the bombing of World War II, and now this." Another priceless pique was, "What about that terrible spiral staircase!" (it only goes between two floors of the building, otherwise people have to cram into two fairly small elevators to move up and down the low-storey building. It also looks puny).
There's no getting round the brashness of the museum's design, which appears to have come straight out of the 1990s. The official rubric says the building was planned to blend in with the locality, which is startlingly delusory: It was designed to be flashy, and bask in the attention of being the new kid on the block. It does this very well.
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