Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (Hiroshima MOCA)

Opened on May 3, 1989, the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art is the first public art museum to devote exclusively to contemporary art in the whole of Japan. It is situated amid the rich greenery of the Hijiyama park, commanding sweeping views over the city. The museum building is of design by the architect Kisho Kurokawa. While blending the building harmoniously with the nature of the museum, and the building’s materials change as one moves upward through it, from natural stone, through tiles, to aluminum, created by humans, representing the unfolding of civilization out of the past into the future, and the flow of time, as well as Kurokawa’s unique philosophy of symbiosis.