Why you should experience Azabudai Hills Gallery in Tokyo, Japan.
Azabudai Hills Gallery is an ambitious contemporary arts venue where Toranomon's cultural expansion, international exhibitions, curatorial experimentation and sculptural architecture converge within one of Central Tokyo's largest recent redevelopment projects.
Set along Sakurada-dori near Gaien-Higashi-dori and just steps from Kamiyacho Station, the gallery occupies Garden Plaza A within an 8.1-hectare district created after more than three decades of negotiations with 300 landowners, embedding a dedicated cultural institution inside a development that reorganized fragmented hills, valleys and aging building plots into 2.4 hectares of greenery, new pedestrian routes and architecture by international design teams. The 2,300-square-meter facility includes around 700 square meters of exhibition area across the intermediate basement level, with associated gallery spaces extending into the floor below. Heatherwick Studio designed the undulating low-rise architecture surrounding the gallery, using overlapping roof-like forms that rise from landscaped ground around the Garden Plaza buildings. The result is a purpose-built arts venue whose exhibitions occupy the cultural center of a redevelopment conceived to place art directly within the circulation, architecture and public ground of a new urban district.
What you should know about Azabudai Hills Gallery.
Azabudai Hills Gallery is best known for operating as the principal cultural promotion facility within Mori Building's plan to treat the wider Azabudai Hills district as a museum extending beyond conventional exhibition rooms. Mori Building's involvement with the Toranomon-Azabudai area reaches to the establishment of a redevelopment council in 1989. Formal city planning approval arrived in 2017 under Japan's National Strategic Special Zones system. The Toranomon-Azabudai District Urban Redevelopment Association subsequently formed with Mori Building and Japan Post among its principal participants. Construction began on August 5, 2019, initiating an undertaking whose completed buildings contain 861,700 square meters of total floor area. Pelli Clarke & Partners designed the exteriors of the three towers, and Heatherwick Studio developed the public realm and low-rise architecture in its first Japanese project to reach construction. Shimizu Corporation completed the A District and Obayashi Corporation completed the Garden Plaza structures in June 2023. Azabudai Hills opened on November 24, 2023 with 1,400 residences, 214,500 square meters of offices, around 150 shops and restaurants and extensive cultural facilities distributed around its central green spaces. The gallery entered this enormous architectural program as the institution charged with presenting art, fashion, entertainment and other cultural fields within Mori Building's broader cultural strategy for the district.
Olafur Eliasson supplied the gallery's first major curatorial statement through A harmonious cycle of interconnected nows, presented from November 24, 2023 through March 31, 2024. Mori Art Museum director Mami Kataoka and associate curator Takuya Tokuyama organized the exhibition around Eliasson's investigations of light, geometry, movement and natural phenomena. Your split second house, created in 2010, produced a 20-meter-long installation using water and strobe illumination, joined by new drawings generated through sunlight and wind. Eliasson also created A harmonious cycle of interconnected nows as a permanent public artwork for Azabudai Hills, connecting the inaugural exhibition with art beyond the gallery rooms. Alexander Calder became the subject of the institution's second major exhibition beginning in May 2024, marking his first solo exhibition in Tokyo in nearly 35 years. Calder Foundation president Alexander S. C. Rower curated 100 works spanning the 1930s through the 1970s, including mobiles, stabiles, paintings and works on paper. Pace Gallery collaborated on the project, extending the institution's international partnership model immediately after its Eliasson debut. Subsequent programming across art and fashion established the gallery as an exhibition platform capable of shifting among artistic disciplines within a facility built specifically for changing cultural presentations.
How to fold Azabudai Hills Gallery into your trip.
Azabudai Hills Gallery works as the anchor for a daytime progression through a Sumitomo family collection rooted in industrial modernization, Japan's oldest surviving private art museum and a museum devoted to contemporary Japanese ceramics.
Begin at Sen-oku Hakukokan Museum Tokyo, whose collection was shaped principally by Sumitomo Kichizaemon Tomoito, known as Shunsui, the fifteenth head of the Sumitomo family. Shunsui expanded the family enterprise beyond copper mining during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and assembled ancient Chinese bronzes alongside Japanese and Chinese painting, Western painting, ceramics, tea utensils, Noh masks and other works. More than 500 bronzes and mirrors donated by the Sumitomo family established Sen-oku Hakukokan in 1960, and the Tokyo branch opened on the former Sumitomo Azabu residence property in October 2002. Its wider holdings now exceed 3,500 works, including two National Treasures and 20 Important Cultural Properties. Continue to Okura Museum of Art, founded by industrialist Kihachiro Okura in 1917 to publicly preserve the Asian art collection accumulated through his business career. Okura had established Okura Gumi Shokai in 1873 and developed interests spanning construction, trade and numerous industrial enterprises during Meiji modernization. Fire following the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake destroyed the original museum building, and his son Kishichiro Okura commissioned architect Chuta Ito to design the present structure, completed in 1927. Conclude at Kikuchi Kanjitsu Memorial Tomo Museum, established in 2003 around the collection assembled by Tomo Kikuchi, who concentrated on contemporary Japanese ceramics. Kikuchi developed close relationships with ceramists and acquired works by figures including Kenkichi Tomimoto, Kazuo Yagi, Shoji Kamoda, Osamu Suzuki and Tatsusuke Kuriki. Exhibition rooms were designed specifically around the presentation of ceramics, creating an institution devoted to postwar and contemporary makers working across clay and associated craft disciplines. The progression moves from Sumitomo patronage connecting industrial modernization with ancient and modern art through Okura's early private museum project into Kikuchi's specialized commitment to contemporary ceramics, extending Azabudai Hills Gallery's new exhibition program through three distinct traditions of private collecting and cultural patronage.
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