Tadao Ando evokes a celebrated novelist’s passion for historical research in a museum that complements his home in Osaka, photographed for ‘Domus’ by Todd Eberle. Text by Michael Webb

Tadao Ando’s mastery of materials and geometry is never in doubt, even if the intensity of feeling and compressed energy that characterized his small buildings can be hard to find in some of his recent works, which have suffered from an inflation of scale. At the urging of clients with a taste for grandeur, unconstrained by cost, content and audience, the projects have become intimidatingly vast. But the compact library/museum that Ando recently completed in an Osaka suburb is a return to the sublime quality of his Church of the Light and Water Temple.

The Shiba Ryotaro Memorial Museum celebrates a writer who was enormously popular and respected. Born in Osaka in 1923, Shiba Ryotaro served as a soldier in the imperial army, an experience that left him traumatized by his commanders’ brutality and the militarism of the system they represented. He dedicated the rest of his life to making sense of Japan’s turbulent history, from the Meiji era on. Beginning as a newspaper reporter, he turned to writing meticulously researched historical novels – including Drunk as a Lord, Burning Sword and The Last Shogun – that won a wide following in Japan and, in translation, abroad. When he died, in 1996, his widow established a foundation in his name to award prizes and fellowships and to commission the museum, which curves away from his house in a graceful arc through a leafy garden.

In plan, the reinforced concrete building comprises two overlapping arcs of a circle intersected with radial walls. Staircases and service rooms jut at an angle from the inner face. Visitors enter a modest gate in the garden wall and follow a winding path. A tall glazed portico wrapped around the windowless south wall draws you into the lobby, where you are captured by the spectacle of the book stacks. The library Ryotaro amassed during his 50-year career must have overflowed every shelf in his spacious house. The collection has now been transferred to the museum, and it has become its dominant theme. Two eight-metre-high walls lined from floor to ceiling with books curve away to a geometrically patterned window. A steel gallery extends around the room from the librarian’s office on the upper level, and stairs lead down from the lobby to the exhibition area at the basement level.

Ando describes the experience as ‘diving into the mind of the author’, and it dramatizes Ryotaro’s passion for research and the solid foundation he laid for his investigations of the past. Inspired by the dynamic verticality of Piranesi’s Prisons – as he was in the vertiginous stairways and split floors of his Osaka office – the architect has created a building that is both intensely personal and in harmony with its subject. The sharp turns and shifts of level are vintage Ando, a voyage of discovery through 1,000 square metres of space that are tightly contained but feel infinite. You feel yourself drawn forward to explore the library from different vantage points, allowing it to wrap around and envelope you. There’s an elegant, fan-shaped screening room, a display of memorabilia and the inevitable sales area, but these play subsidiary roles. The museum is rigorous yet welcoming, a concrete shell lined with Japanese oak: cool and warm materials that play off each other. Both have the refinement of craft that is Ando’s signature, and they glow softly in the abundant natural light that spills in from the east through a checkerboard of clear and moulded glass, designed with only partial success to filter harmful rays. The curve of the room is echoed in the shifting angles of the floorboards, and the mobile library stair evokes a stack of tansu chests that plays off the grid of the shelves. However, it’s evident that the books are more for display than use, for there are many areas that appear to be inaccessible.

What validates Ando’s design is the evident pleasure it gives the author’s admirers, for whom this space has become a shrine. They are caught up in the spirit of the place, wandering happily from one display to another, absorbed in their memories of the joy of reading.