Osaka Prefectural Sayamaike Museum

This museum,, around an hour away from Osaka, is considered a "site museum" of Sayanaike Pond. Sayanaike Pond is the oldest pond for irrigation in Japan, made in the 7th century with an early earth filled dam at first,and its reaches extended all the way to Osaka Castle. The layers of the pond bank formed through around a thousand years of history. The museum displays relics of the recovered site, including the main attraction, a wall piece of the pond bank, a huge monument to ancient engineering, in the front lobby as well the wooden pipes originally used. The museum itself is a monument to the pond, with its siting next to the pond and its architectural elements.

Piece of Pond Bank

The walls of the park complex before the museum entrance are made of rough cut granite stone and seem to blend in with the landscape. Following a path along the waters of Sayamaike, visitors pass a series of granite walls before arriving at a concrete plaza. From here, visitors descend down a staircase, below the pools of water on the upper level, into a water plaza with cascading water falls on both sides. The museum consists of two rectangular volumes flanked by this water plaza. The space is very sensory as people hear sounds of water when walking through recessed walkway as well as seeing both water and light hitting the pool. At the end of this spatial sequence, one enters a cylindrical volume that silences the sound of the water and leads the visitor into the interior of the museum, only giving visitors a cutaway of the plaza.