a+u 2025:06 Feature: Jun Aoki Museum
Content
a+u’s June issue features Jun Aoki.
Jun Aoki, whose work spans residential, commercial, and public architecture, is one of Japan’s leading architects. Beyond his built work, his discourse has also drawn wide attention. This issue highlights projects related to art.
Regardless of its intended function, Aoki’s architecture remains open to diverse uses and invites relationships that have yet to be fully seen or defined. It stands apart from both any perceived homogeneity of contemporary society and insistence on a singular personal message. Instead, it embraces ambiguity and contradictions, allowing for the coexistence of differing values and rhythms that each individual brings to the experience of art. Nor is his design process a straightforward path toward a fixed concept. Rather, it is shaped by a desire to reach an unseen world – free from assumptions and conventions – through collaboration with people of different backgrounds, generations, and professions. Aoki suggests that this approach is most evident in the “Museum,” where elements that emerge from everyday life accumulate into culture, eventually giving rise to the museum itself.
The projects featured in this issue include public art museums, galleries, exhibition designs, and artworks. Each one transforms into a unique spatial experience depending on the art it hosts, the people who visit, and its moment in time. These 25 projects, expansive in their possibilities, embrace the fluidity of such encounters. Presented alongside newly written essays and commentary by Aoki himself, this issue aims to offer a glimpse of potential of Architecture to suggest a freer future. (a+u)
Preface 4
Kyoto City Museum of Art (Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art)
Proposal for V&A Exhibition Road
Proposal for TOPOGRAPHIE DES TERRORS
Proposal for Fukuoka Prefectural Museum of Art
Proposal for the Museum of Modern Art, Shiga
Essay: In-Between
TARO NASU OSAKA, TARO NASU BAMBI
TARO NASU
ShugoArts
the red and blue line
Language and Art: Takashi Hiraide and the Artists
Okayama House
Wobble Tube
U bis
Naofumi Maruyama Kicking the Water: Sengokuhara
Wonderment Noe Aoki / Ritsue Mishima
Aki Kondo: What I Saw, When I Tore Myself Open
Essay: Renovation as Negation
AOMORI MUSEUM OF ART
The Wright Imperial Hotel at 100: Frank Lloyd Wright and
the World
cobweb and spider
Essay: Fluxforms, Rrevisited
Exhibition as Temporary Renovation
Shin-Masaki Memorial Gallery
Birds Keep Swimming
HAPPY TURN 132
Clouds and Breaths
RABBIT HOLE