The Yokousuka Museum of Art (MOA) is the first museum to be designed by Riken Yamamoto. Set within a rural landscape by the Pacific, the museum utilizes the nature around as a part of the museum. One can walk around the museum to its back garden on the mountain side, then to the roof terrace of the museum and enter the museum from the observatory there. This way of entering the museum is much more revealing than entering from the front entrance, since you actually go through two layers that comprize the structure and see the inbetween space on the way down. The museum is like a ship, has a thick steel monocoque skin painted in white as the main structure. In order to protect this skin from the harsh environment, Yamamoto encased it with a glass box and this feature is quite visible from exterior, largely determining how the museum looks. Several exhibition rooms are detached from the main structure and dispersed in the landscape. This composition forces visitors to go outside a couple of times while wiewing the exhibition even when it is raining. Yamamoto has been experimenting this composition from his early careers and applied it to different functions including private houses.
