Tobacco & Salt Museum, Conversion

The Tobacco & Salt Museum in Shibuya, nicknamed “Tabashio” (from the Japanese words for tobacco and salt), was becoming run down, and held a growing stock of materials. This project relocated it to a site in Meguro ward and refurbished it, roughly doubling the exhibition floor area. The facility that became the new museum had been used as a warehouse associated with tobacco and its manufacturing machinery, and even after it was converted and opened as a museum, half of it was still used as a company warehouse. In converting the building to a museum, we added new escalators and elevators to make the building barrier free and easier to circulate around as a museum. In addition to seismic reinforcement, we extended the existing reinforced concrete outer walls further to the outside and covered them with cast cement panels, in order to provide the strong water resistance a museum needs, and to reduce temperature changes caused by solar loads. This outer skin heightened the identity of the museum by using three types of panel surface and five color tones in different positions, to represent the old-fashioned tobacco-making scene where tobacco leaves were hung up to dry indoors. The interior spaces used the limited openings of the existing facilities to bring in soft light, creating spaces in harmony with the exhibition rooms, with no feeling of the constraints of remodeling.