Water and light: a new musem dedicated to the relics and techniques of ancient Japanese water engineering is a series of soaring spaces that lyrically synthesize water and light.

The Japanese are mad for museums, erecting elaborate structures to celebrate sand, sunsets, bridges (this last a playful recreation of Palladio's unrealized design for the Rialto in Venice) and just about everything else that can be put within four walls. Tadao Ando has made a specialty of this building type, designing museums for children, literature, wood, daylight, and two for prehistoric tombs, as well as a succession of art museums -- most recently in Fort Worth, Texas. In each, he strives to find an appropriate expression of the theme, developing architectural metaphors from an austere vocabulary of concrete planes and rotundas, ramps and stairs. In the best of these, there is a harmonious match of container and contents; in others, the processional routes and soaring volumes upstage the exhibits and exhaust less athletic visitors.

The Sayamaike Historical Museum in Ando's home city of Osaka is an impressive monument that conveys the power of water and the challenge it presents to engineers who want to tame it. It is located beside an artificial lake that dates back to the seventh century. Over the centuries, monks and feudal retainers applied their skills to enlarging the earthen dam and installing wood or stone conduits to carry water to neighbouring fields. Relics of this early engineering were excavated when the shore of the lake was recently heightened and landscaped to serve as a flood control basin. A 15.4m high slice through the old dam was painstakingly cut away, dried out, and reassembled to show how layers were added and sluices threaded through by a succession of builders.

To house this earthwork, Ando has erected a multi-level bastion that rises like a castle beside the pond, shutting out its banal suburban neighbours. A switchback ramp scales a battered wall of rough granite blocks and you wonder if defenders will appear on the ramparts above and drive you off with rocks and boiling oil. You emerge into a bare concrete piazza and look for an entry to a windowless slab that could be the castle keep. The monolith is enigmatic and seemingly impenetrable, its cross-bracing expressed in bands of white on grey stone. Steps in a corner of the piazza lead down to a court in which you are suddenly overwhelmed by water cascading down the walls, splashing over a recessed walkway, and throwing off a fine mist -- as though you had scaled a dam and found yourself in its sluiceway, wondering if the force of the torrent might carry you away. It's one of Ando's most compelling theatrical coups, but he diminishes its impact by extending the underwater passage into a rotunda, from where another ramp leads to the mid-level entrance in the side of the slab.

Within the museum, the brute power of the masonry and tumbling water is dissipated. Though the earth dam may be historically important, it's not much to look at and it is dwarfed by the hall that rises far above, even when you are descending the ramp that leads past it to the display area below. Archaeologists may appreciate the fragments of primitive plumbing that are stretched out through another hall and wrapped around the rotunda, but students of architecture are more likely to ignore the displays and gaze admiringly at this monumental sculpture by a master of light, space, and meticulously poured concrete. As such, it's magnificent, but it drew only a couple of visitors on a recent Sunday afternoon. Nor does the lake lure you to its sterile banks, for the abundant wildlife it may once have contained now survives only as a video (maddeningly repeated in the lobby) in which two insufferably cute infants fly in on a leaf and chatter excitedly about the birds and flowers as music tinkles over this fantasy of nature preserved.

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Architect

Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Osaka

Project team

Tadao Ando, Takaaki Mizutani, Kanya Sogo

Structural engineer

Wada

Mechanical engineer

Setsubi-Giken

Photographs

Shigeo Ogawa/Japan Architect

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The museum is poised on the edge at an artificial lake that dates back to the seventh century.

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Crisp cubold volumes are reflected in the building's internal pools.

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Simple geometries combine with Ando's characteristically austere palette of materials.

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A rotunda acts as a hinge between the two parts of the building.

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The long central pool is framed by diaphanous, cascading walls of water, with the rotunda beyond.

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Visitors pass along the edge of the central pool, with its light diffusing curtain of water.

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The soaring Internal spaces were determined by the scale of the building's contents.

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The excavated wall of a dam housed in a triple-height exhibition hall is museum's main archaeological relic.