Art house: Kuma brings order and coherence to Masanari Murai's studio museum.

A giant ink stone, old TVs, wooden spoons of various sizes, and an original sculpture by Salvador Dali are among an eclectic hoard of antique furniture and work materials that have been carefully resurrected at the Murai Masanari Art Museum. The architect Kengo Kuma's new addition to Tokyo's urban sprawl displays not only the work of the late Masanari Murai (1905-1999), a pioneer in modernist abstract painting, but also his actual studio, part of a 60-year-old wooden house which has been saved along with most of its contents.

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Less maniacal perhaps than the working legacy left by Murai contemporary Francis Bacon--whose own South Kensington studio, and thousands of ephemeral bits and pieces contained within it, was relocated from South Kensington to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin--Murai's house nevertheless presented a challenge. A multitude of everyday objects were hoarded by the artist, and whenever he ran out of space, he simply extended his studio rather than part with his collection; hence a maze evolved, with corridors that led nowhere and rooms that could only be accessed by climbing through the windows of an adjoining room. Inhabiting these labyrinthine channels, Murai lived, worked and taught painting there until his death at the age of 93 in 1999.

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Captivated by this extraordinary space, Kuma decided to incorporate the studio's various components into his design. As well as the studio, the original exterior timbers, with holes and scratches, have been saved and reassembled as louvres on the facade. Tall indigenous trees shade the reinforced steel building and a concrete walkway cuts through raised Cor-ten platforms filled with water. Like the effect of the illusion created in Richard Wilson's oil tank installation at the Saatchi Gallery, the museum seems to rise out of a deeper pond, especially at night, when the water reflects light from within. To complete his artistic excavation, Kuma has salvaged the painter's beloved Toyota Crown car from 20 years of disuse and displayed it as an outdoor sculpture immersed in the pond in front of the museum.

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Inside, Murai's studio is neatly tucked away at the back of an L-shaped exhibition hall. Floorboards still creak as the spaces inside are traversed, while its gloom contrasts with the luminescent daylit white space of the surrounding gallery. As bold patches on the exterior wall reveal parts of a jigsaw that formed the older house, a wafer-thin white steel staircase cuts across it diagonally, for ever blocking the old doorway. Up the staircase, the white steel mesh walls and the original front door with a large old-fashioned bell divide a small landing and the humble accommodation reserved for Murai's widow.

Kuma has been careful to emphasise the multi-purpose aspect of the museum: 'It still is a house, even though it's located inside an art museum. I wanted to maintain this sense of duality, as I thought that the tenderness of a home is well suited to Murai's artwork.' What then seems like an exemplary postmodern museum, where the past has been cleverly deconstructed, reassembled and finally incorporated into the design, may be tempered by its careful treatment of this artistic past. The studio, offset against a white shield, appears disciplined and muted. The maze-like charm of the old rambling structure, for example, has all but disappeared, but in a country where old buildings get ritually demolished and rebuilt, this was perhaps unavoidable.

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