When exploring a new place, some of us are irresistibly drawn to local museums – the bigger, the better. Yet, for many, the sheer size of some institutions can feel intimidating or simply overwhelming. The vastness, the dense flow of information, and the unspoken expectation to engage deeply with every exhibit can indeed be exhausting.
And then there are those who long to escape "museum fatigue" altogether, imagining smaller, mobile, or temporary museums, spaces that can be reshaped and reconfigured to offer a more dynamic, digestible, and engaging way to experience culture without the sensory overload.
For what regards portable museums, in the past there have been initiatives and experiments involving small museums housed in shipping containers, such as Architects in Rome's Le musée itinerant (2017) in Carthage, Tunisia, and Héctor Ayarza's Wandering Museum (2019), in collaboration with the Panama City-based Museum of Contemporary Art, yet there have been no instances of shipping container structures designed to travel on water as of yet. Yet, there is an architect who has been actively involved in projects centered on cutting-edge and innovative museum designs – Shigeru Ban.
"Canadian filmmaker and photographer Gregory Colbert approached me to design a mobile art exhibition space for his work," Ban recalls. The result was the Nomadic Museum (2000), a structure composed of shipping containers, paper tubes, and steel cable trusses, serving as a traveling exhibition space that moved alongside the artworks it housed. "Colbert wanted a museum that could be moved and relocated, and I devised a way to achieve this," Ban explains. "While it wasn’t technically complex, the main challenge was to make it cost-effective and easy to transport."
Shipping containers seemed the immediate solution, as they are readily available for rental worldwide. "I didn't need to transport them; I simply utilized local materials," Ban remembers, "so, logistically, it was not a difficult task."
The shipping containers were positioned in two parallel lines stretching over 205 meters. To reduce weight, they were stacked in a chessboard-like layout, with openings concealed by diagonal membranes that added to the façade’s aesthetic appeal. A colonnade constructed from paper tubes provided support for the triangular truss forming the roof. The initial site for this project was Pier 54 in New York, historically known as the arrival point for the Titanic. Then the museum traveled to other cities such as Santa Monica, Los Angeles and Tokyo.
The Japanese architect often tried in his projects to transcend boundaries and blur the lines between indoor and outdoor spaces. At the Tainan Art Museum, Taiwan, (2019) he conceived a building typology that unifies the art museum and park activities into an integrated whole, creating a fluid experience. This design allows for smooth transitions between the museum and the park, allowing visitors to freely move between them. "Tainan City Museum is in the middle of a city, but it is also surrounded by a park where people were enjoying the green space. That's why I overlapped the functions of the park and the museum," Ban explains.
Different-sized galleries, resembling stacked building blocks, were strategically shifted and stacked, forming interconnected rooftop park spaces. The museum's entrances are thoughtfully positioned in the gaps between these individual galleries. "The client had a clear vision for the size of the galleries, they weren't looking for vast exhibition halls but preferred smaller, more intimate spaces. That's what made it possible to stack them this way," Ban says.
The inspiration for this project came from the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, where clusters of galleries are nestled within a beautiful landscape. "It is my favorite museum," Ban says. "I like it because it allows visitors to seamlessly transition between indoor and outdoor spaces after visiting the galleries. Unlike larger museums, such as the Louvre, where the sheer volume of art can be mentally and physically exhausting, the Louisiana Museum's success lies in its ability to offer visitors a refreshing change of scenery. This concept inspired me to create a similar experience within an urban context."
This approach was also followed for the Simose Art Museum. Home to approximately 500 artworks, the Simose Art Museum opened its doors in March 2023, making it the first art museum in Otake, Hiroshima Prefecture. Perched on the shores of the Seto Inland Sea, this innovative complex includes a museum, ten meticulously crafted villas known as the Forest Villas and Waterfront Villas, and a restaurant.
The museum itself is a work of art, featuring eight dynamic, box-like exhibition rooms. Inspired by the islands of the Seto Inland Sea, these movable colorful galleries float on a serene water basin.
"For this museum, I created small floating galleries that can be rearranged in different patterns and can be adapted to different exhibitions," Ban explains. "These gallery structures are designed to float on a pond. To change their positions, water is added to the pond and the structures are manually pushed to the desired location. Although implementing this system was technically challenging, we adapted an existing technology used for transporting construction materials by ship."
The gallery positions can be reconfigured in a relatively short time, a week or two. In this way visitors can get surprising fresh perspectives while living in the perimeter of the museum the sense of the ever-changing landscapes of the Seto Inland Sea.
Addressing the challenges of humidity and temperature, which can be detrimental to artworks, the museum has taken a meticulous approach by installing individual air conditioning units in each gallery room.
The client was thrilled with the project and the solutions Ban developed – so much so that the architect is eager to bring this concept to other countries. "If I can find a good client, I will definitely do it," he says.
But could these ideas work in other places on the water, like Venice? Ban notes that renovating historical buildings in Italy is particularly challenging due to strict preservation regulations. Significant alterations to these structures are generally prohibited. "You can't touch too many parts of historical buildings, so they end up being very difficult to improve," he explains.
However, he sees potential for adaptation. Inspired by the Tainan Art Museum, Ban suggests that incorporating semi-outdoor or indoor terraces between galleries in historical buildings could enhance the museum experience, offering moments of openness and fluidity to help prevent visitor fatigue.
Though he has a deep passion for designing museums, Ban's current focus extends beyond them. Right now, his attention is on other projects in Italy. "This summer, I'll be holding a workshop with the University of Bologna to build temporary classrooms for an elementary school damaged by the May flooding in Emilia Romagna," he says.
Next week, however, his work will take him to Ukraine. Since the beginning of the war, Ban has been actively involved in various humanitarian projects. Through the Voluntary Architects Network (VAN), he has provided Paper Partition Systems (PPS) for shelters and supplied Japanese-made wood stoves to Ukrainian communities.
"We are also planning to develop an affordable housing project called the Styrofoam Housing System (SHS) and are working on the construction of a new surgical ward at a hospital in Lviv," he adds.
Our conversation turns to temporary structures for emergencies and the broader concept of mobility in architecture. Ban distinguishes between temporary and moving structures, emphasizing that they serve different purposes. He also challenges the conventional idea of permanence. "I design temporary structures for emergencies, but people often love them so much that they decide to keep them as permanent buildings," he reflects.
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