Mori Art Museum Audio Guide

Mori Art Museum: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to Mori Art Museum

   Welcome to the Mori Art Museum, known in Japanese as 森美術館. You are in Minato Ward, in the Roppongi district of Tokyo, and your destination is not at street level at all. The museum sits inside the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, on the fifty-third floor of a tower that rises 54 floors above the ground. It is a contemporary art museum, and it is part of the Roppongi Hills complex, a huge mix of offices, shops, cultural spaces and homes. Here is the detail that makes people smile: the exhibition space is about 230 meters above the ground, which makes it the highest exhibition space inside any building in Japan. So before you have looked at a single artwork, the building has already made its first statement about where art belongs in this city. Over the next few minutes we will look at why a developer put an art museum at the top of a skyscraper, who designed the galleries, and what kind of exhibitions have made this place a fixture of Tokyo's cultural life.

2. 02

   Mori Art Museum: Culture Above Commerce

   Ask any property developer where the best spot in a skyscraper is, and the answer is usually the top. Normally that is where the highest rents are charged, so the top floors go to offices or restaurants. The creators of Roppongi Hills chose differently. Their concept was simple and bold: place culture, meaning art, above the economy, meaning the offices. The idea belonged to Minoru Mori, the president of Mori Building, who died in 2012. He wanted to turn Roppongi into a cultural city center, and he wanted a symbol of that ambition at the very top of the tower. In the museum's own founding message, the cultural city center was described as the most important concept of Roppongi Hills from the moment it was imagined, as a new model of urban redevelopment. There is a wider story here too. Before this museum opened, museums inside office buildings in Japan were rare, mostly limited to the Idemitsu Museum of Arts in Tokyo and to museums inside department stores. The opening of the Mori Art Museum in October 2003 helped make the idea of a museum inside a building feel natural. When you ride the elevator up, you are following a path that this museum helped open.

3. 03

   Mori Art Museum: Designing a Gallery in the Sky

   Building an art museum on the fifty-third floor of a tower is a very particular challenge, and the person chosen to meet it was the American architect Richard Gluckman. He is known for museum work in New York and Berlin, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim museum in Berlin. For Mori Art Museum he shaped the galleries of the museum within the Mori Arts Center, of which the museum is the heart. Think about what that means as you walk through. You are inside a tower in one of the busiest districts of a city of millions, yet the galleries are designed to be spaces for concentrated looking at contemporary art. The museum also sits within a larger ambition. Minoru Mori spent 17 years developing Roppongi Hills before it opened. He imagined a complex where commuting times would shrink and people could spend more time on family, community and leisure, with culture at the center. The museum is the high point of that dream, both literally and figuratively.

4. 04

   Mori Art Museum: Exhibitions That Start Conversations

   What do you see once you arrive? Since opening, the Mori Art Museum has built its reputation on exhibitions with a strong theme and an original angle, and it has won praise from general visitors and specialists alike. Its shows have included major presentations on Ai Weiwei and Francis Bacon, as well as an exhibition called Catastrophe and the Power of Art. The museum has also looked outward from the start. In 2004 it presented Roppongi Crossing, an exhibition exploring contemporary art, architecture and design, mainly from Japan and East Asia, and how these fields had become an indispensable part of everyday life. It was developed in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The museum has also said that giving young artists from Japan and Asia better opportunities to present their work is one of its important roles. And then there is the schedule. During exhibitions the museum stays open without regular closing days and keeps late hours, which is unusual among Tokyo's major museums. The idea is that a visit can happen after work or after dinner, whenever curiosity strikes. It also runs a wide range of learning programs, because the museum wants art to spark open discussion about our culture and society.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off

   As you wander through the galleries, keep one thought in mind: this museum began with a conviction that art deserves the best position in the city, not a leftover corner. Everything you encounter here, from the height of the floor to the late opening hours, grows out of that conviction. Notice how the museum describes itself as a place where visitors can enjoy, be stimulated and start a conversation. Try it. Choose one work that unsettles you and think about what question it raises. The museum's own words invite exactly that kind of open debate. The current exhibition will be different from any of the ones we have talked about, and that is part of the pleasure of coming back. Every new show on the fifty-third floor is another chance to see what contemporary art, Tokyo and the world are talking about right now.