Mikasa City Art Museum

About

The building, surrounded by light-toned concrete walls, presents a neat form from the outside, but stepping inside reveals ground bearing traces of volcanic rock, leading into an exhibition space set underground. Lighting installed on the ceiling illuminates, without obstruction, the traces of layered mining strata. This land, once filled by coal mining, has now become a quiet space holding fossils, and among them, the especially famous 'Yezomikasaura'-type fossil, with its familiar form, stops visitors in their tracks. Though strong sunlight seeps in through the rear windows, the darkness of the exhibition room seems to guard the time long accumulated within the soil. As if exploring beneath the ground of Mikasa City, this museum is a place that watches over the traces the earth's ancient history has left behind.