Designed and constructed in 1974 by Makoto Suzuki and its current director Yukio Futagawa, GA Gallery is a well-weathered building dedicated to the display of architecture. Despite Japanese architects having achieved several decades of acclaim both at home and abroad, Tokyo only has two specialist architecture galleries of this kind.GA Gallery is located between Yoyogi and Harajuku Station in one of those overlooked recesses of the city. The building sits in between the roaring mess of ongoing construction work on Meiji Dori and the busy tracks of Yamanote line, and yet somehow this street manages to retain a sense of calm.
Once you have walked up the cantilevered stairs leading to the gallery, you find yourself in an uncompromising concrete cube of an exhibition space. GA Gallery’s displays aim to illuminate the complexity of the process architects go though in order to design and realize their structures. While you look at schematics and maquettes, the bare concrete walls of the gallery space are a constant, tangible reminder of the physicality of the end result.
Even when the gallery is between exhibitions, it is worth a visit for its bookshop. There you’ll find a comprehensive range of publications, with of course many from the ‘Global Architecture’ range of books and magazines distributed by the architectural publishing house behind the gallery. (http://artspacetokyo.com/artmaps/ga_gallery/)
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