Towada Art Center

Towada is a small city on the Aomori plain laid out on a grid by the Meiji government, and in 2008 it did something unusual with its main street: it commissioned a museum of separate white boxes, each holding a single permanently installed commissioned work, linked by glass corridors, so that the building reads as a small village of galleries rather than one block. Several of the works are outdoors or visible from the street, which means the museum leaks into the town.

The collection is site-specific and international — a Ron Mueck standing woman four metres tall, an Ana Laura Aláez, a Yayoi Kusama installation of spotted figures in the square opposite, a Choi Jeong Hwa flower horse on the corner. The Art Square across the road is free and always open. For a city of sixty thousand people this is a genuinely serious institution and it has quietly reorganised the whole main street around itself.