The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, an Outstanding Contribution to the Modern Movement

The museum exists because of a collection. Matsukata Kojiro, president of the Kawasaki Dockyard in Kobe, assembled a vast collection of European art in the 1910s and 1920s, much of which remained in France. Seized as enemy property after the Second World War, it was returned to Japan in 1959 — some 370 works — on condition that a museum be built to house it. The Japanese government commissioned Le Corbusier.

Le Corbusier visited Tokyo in 1955 and designed the main building, while three Japanese architects who had worked in his Paris studio — Maekawa Kunio, Sakakura Junzo and Yoshizaka Takamasa — prepared the detailed design and supervised construction. The result is a reinforced concrete block raised on pilotis, clad in panels of pebble-aggregate concrete. Inside, a ramp leads from a central, top-lit hall, the Hall of the 19th Century, into galleries arranged as a square spiral, a plan meant to allow the museum to grow outward indefinitely. The building uses the proportional system of the Modulor throughout.

The museum opened in June 1959 in Ueno Park. Later wings were added by Maekawa Kunio, and a seismic base-isolation system was installed beneath the original building in the 1990s. Japan's component was inscribed in 2016 together with sixteen other works by Le Corbusier in Argentina, Belgium, France, Germany, India and Switzerland — the first World Heritage property to span three continents.

The transnational property was inscribed under three criteria. Le Corbusier's work represents a masterpiece of human creative genius, providing an outstanding response to fundamental architectural and social challenges of the 20th century (criterion i). It bears witness to an unprecedented worldwide exchange of ideas over half a century, in relation to the birth and development of the Modern Movement, from Europe to South America, India and Japan (criterion ii).

The works are directly and materially associated with the ideas of the Modern Movement, whose theories and works had outstanding universal significance in the 20th century (criterion vi). The National Museum of Western Art represents the museum typology in the series and shows how Le Corbusier's ideas were transmitted to Japan and carried forward by his Japanese disciples, who became leading figures of post-war Japanese architecture.