The Mori Art Museum is a contemporary art museum located in Tokyo, Japan. The design of the museum’s map reflects the spatio-domestic concerns and pragmatic values of its people, and as such reflects the country’s politics. The map is designed around accessibility and reveals the relationship of the museum to its urban environment. Main street names, subway lines, and identifiable businesses in proximity to the museum are listed here, so that the focus is always on the museum’s location in relation to other public services.
Given that the Mori is located in Tokyo, it was designed to meet the demands of a densely populated metropolitan area — namely, the architecture demonstrates a creativity when addressing the issues of maximizing the accessibility of a small public space. The city of Tokyo similarly addresses the issue of space with complex underground cities and mazes of shopping arcades hidden from the main streets. This type of “inner arcology” that is so prevalent in Japan’s architecture is reflected in the Mori Art Museum inasmuch that the entrance is only made reachable via an elevated walkway (many metres above pedestrian walkways and roadways) and is strategically hidden from street view. The entirety of the museum is perched atop a tower of other unrelated businesses, which mimics the urban design of many other small businesses in Tokyo. It is not uncommon for a storefront to be completely unreachable and invisible from the street. Urban space in Japan must be traversed inwardly and vertically, in stark contrast to the horizontal layouts of museums such as the MET or LACMA. LACMA in particular is the single largest museum west of the Rocky Mountains, and as such is partitioned into separate buildings and departments to hold its massive collections and rotating exhibitions. While the Mori also operates in the interest of holding rotating contemporary art exhibitions, it does not operate on the scale of institutions such as LACMA. The Mori Art Museum, like many art museums in Japan, strategically narrows the scope of its collections and exhibitions to specific genres (such as contemporary versus classical versus natural history) in order to maximize the utility of the museum square footage. Institutions such as LACMA are able to diversify their collections a bit more due to the sheer amount of space available in its urban environment.
The Mori Art Museum thus treats categorization differently than a Western art museum does, inasmuch that the Mori institution is physically limited by its place in the greater urban environment of Tokyo. Its interest is in precision and max utility of a space and representation of a singular discipline. I believe that its categorization is in line with its exhibition rationality, and as such it already stands as an “alternative system of categorization” from modern Western institutions.