21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art

The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art is Kanazawa's most talked-about modern attraction and one of the most visited contemporary art museums in Japan. Opened in 2004 and designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning studio SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa), the building is a low, perfectly circular pavilion wrapped entirely in glass. There is no front or back and no grand entrance staircase; visitors can enter from any direction and drift through the transparent galleries as if the museum were a small town of rooms. The design deliberately dissolves the boundary between the museum and the city around it, and the free-to-enter public zone means locals treat it as a living room as much as an art space.

The undisputed star is Leandro Erlich's The Swimming Pool. From above, you appear to look down through shimmering water at fully clothed people standing on the pool floor; those people are in fact standing in a glass-covered chamber beneath a thin layer of real water, gazing back up at you. Photographing the illusion from both sides has become one of Kanazawa's signature travel moments. Other permanent commissions include James Turrell's Blue Planet Sky, an open-roofed chamber that frames the ever-changing sky, and Olafur Eliasson's colour-shifting Colour Activity House in the surrounding lawn.

Beyond the permanent works, the museum runs an ambitious programme of rotating special exhibitions spanning painting, installation, design and new media, drawing artists from Japan and abroad. The layout separates a free public zone, which includes several artworks, the library, the museum shop and cafe, from the ticketed exhibition zone, so budget travellers can still experience much of the building without paying.

Architecturally the museum rewards slow wandering. Curved glass walls, circular skylit courtyards and rooms of different heights create constant shifts of light, and children in particular love running between the transparent spaces. The lawn outside is dotted with playful outdoor sculpture and is a pleasant place to rest.

The best time to visit is on a weekday morning shortly after opening, when the Swimming Pool and Turrell room are quietest; weekends and holidays can mean timed-entry queues for the paid works. Allow around two hours for a relaxed visit, more if a major special exhibition is on. The museum sits in the cultural heart of Kanazawa in the Hirosaka district, directly beside Kenroku-en Garden, Kanazawa Castle Park, the Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art and the Noh Museum, so it slots naturally into a half-day of sightseeing.

Getting there is easy. From Kanazawa Station's east exit, take the Kanazawa Loop Bus or any Hokutetsu bus bound for Korinbo and alight at the Hirosaka / 21st Century Museum stop; the ride is about ten minutes and the museum is a short walk from the stop. Walking from the station takes roughly twenty minutes through the Korinbo shopping area. The public zone is open late into the evening on Fridays and Saturdays, making it a rewarding end-of-day stop.