Japanese woodwork.

Peter Salter's new Woodcarving Museum at Inami poetically reinterprets the scale and transparency of Japanese vernacular building.

In the Japanese hillside town of Inami, pilgrims and tourists make a gentle ascent along its main thoroughfare towards a spectacular timber gateway to a celebrated Buddhist temple precinct. The presence of such temples explains the town's principal craft industry: woodcarving. As elsewhere in Japan, religious buildings are periodically razed to the ground and reconstructed, ensuring the survival of the requisite craft skills from generation to generation. The same skills are needed to create the variety of artefacts used by worshippers, and purchased by visitors in the shops lining Inami's high street.

Known in Japan for his Osaka Folly (executed in partnership with Chris MacDonald), Peter Salter was commissioned under the auspices of Japan Expo Toyama (JET '92) to design a museum, within a larger masterplan for a new cultural quarter, to allow Inami's visitors a better opportunity of viewing a range of historical and (mostly) contemporary timber crafts - fretted transom screens, small religious sculptural pieces and the like - gaining insight into their traditional meanings and modes of fabrication. It was always the architect's intention that these craft artefacts should become part of a wider architectural setting, and that exhibits should not be seen in isolation.

Working within the parameters of Urban Factory's masterplan, Salter's project takes as its point of departure the characteristic typologies, scales and textures of Toyama's vernacular architecture. In particular, Salter was fascinated by the minka farmsteads, in which buildings of a variety of scales, forms and materials - always related to their function were informally clustered around intimate but quite complex hierarchies of external spaces (AR June 1993). From this contextual analysis emerged the strategy of articulating a number of distinct volumes around a central courtyard. Salter argues that the deliberate fragmentation of his design, respecting the scale of vernacular buildings but never mimicking their details, offers 'a new understanding of known forms'.

While the project's strategy was established early in the design process, the final scheme differs in a number of respects from the original drawings. Salter's architecture is centrally concerned with the articulation of structure and construction. His projects invariably juxtapose heavy and light elements: frames and loadbearing masonry; dark, intimate spaces and expansive volumes filled with bright daylight. Conceptually, the Inami museum was always thought of as a timber-framed building of monumental proportions; yet the realised structure is largely of concrete. As the architect gradually discovered in of developing his design, a of factors - notably Inami's climate and the high incidence of earthquakes throughout Japan - rendered some of his intentions unrealisable. Making the central courtyard accessible to snowploughs (snowfalls can be 4m deep) precluded the creation of a truly intimate garden. The earthquake threat dictated the use of a concrete frame, timber being reserved for internal finishes and secondary structures.

Salter's design - with its emphasis on permeability between and through adjacent spaces - allows the courtyard to become an integral part of the museum, in which temporary exhibits might be located. However, in the months following the museum's opening, this potential remained unfulfilled. The intention to reproduce the distinctive and dramatic quality of light found in minka house interiors was also compromised by the received wisdom of more conventional museum lighting design. Originally, Salter hoped the building could be almost entirely daylit. The finished building, like most public exhibition venues, is heavily dependent on artificial lighting, regardless of external conditions.

Such frustrations notwithstanding, the completed building does contain a number of spaces of interest and quality, and remains true to the basic concept of clearly articulated elements ranged about four sides of a courtyard. Approaching from the town centre or the car park, the building presents a largely blank facade, surmounted by a hierarchy of sculptural objects that articulate the spaces within. The entrance foyer is made apparent through a projecting glazed bay, located at the congruence of the two principal approach routes. Following local precedents, Peter Salter has sought to create a processional route, with thresholds and gateways perceived frontally rather than obliquely wherever possible. In this spirit, visitors are led around an onion-shaped sculptural element into a larger area of open landscape, allowing the entrance facade to be seen from a sufficient distance to give a more-or-less frontal view.

On entering, visitors are presented with a choice of two routes. To the right, a chain of domestically-scaled, semi-autonomous buildings subjects the visitor to a variety of material textures and qualities of lighting. In some spaces, small, copper-lined light cannons - described by Salter as snorkels - serve as interesting sculptural features, if not significant sources of daylight. Small timber artefacts - some no bigger than a few centimetres in overall dimensions - are displayed in recesses in the masonry walls. Abstracted geometrical patterns of pebbles cast into the polished concrete floor recall the traditional motifs seen in the courtyards of Kyoto's temple complexes. Concrete walls are lined with timber, used in a variety of textures and patterns, reinterpreting - never directly imitating - the vernacular use of the material. A couple of rooms afford views into the central courtyard, but mostly the galleries are introverted in character. The exhibits often struggle to assert their presence in these small, yet curiously overbearing interiors. There is no return loop in the sequence. One reaches a dead end, and then returns to the entrance foyer, with the lingering impression that this wing of the museum consists of a number of architectural experiments, a fair proportion of which have been only partially successful.

These criticisms are soon forgotten as one explores the other wing of the museum. This essentially consists of a single volume, under a monopitch roof, the dimensions of which rival those of the largest temples in the vicinity. The scale of the space is broken down, however, by a non-structural timber frame, defining a number of domestically proportioned interiors - a subtle grading of spaces within spaces, and a sensitive response to the domestic scale of the exhibits around which the space is organised. The monopitch form of the building admits daylight both at the 13m high ridge, and through a low, horizontal band of glazing into the courtyard, achieving something of the quality of light that Salter so admires in Japanese vernacular architecture.

The underlying principle of the largest - and most successful - space in the museum is one of modularity. As with all traditional Japanese buildings, Salter's design exhibits a hierarchy of grids, from the giant order of 12m spans, through the secondary timber frame based on a 3.6m module, to the authentic tatamimat patterns of individual display 'rooms'. The building respects the vernacular but reinterprets it, and is a symbiotic product of European and Oriental building traditions.