The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa stands in the center of Kanazawa, on a site linking together diverse but equally important city functions. Circular in form, with a diameter of 112.5 meters, the building has no front or back, leaving it free to be explored from all directions. While being a reaction to the accessibility of the site from multiple points of entry, as well as to its breadth, the circularity of the plan also works in concert with keeping the overall building volume low, to effectively mitigate the scale of the project and an overly grand presence common to large institutions. In order to further encourage the multiplicity of approaches, the architects have intentionally resisted establishing a primary façade or entrance. Programmatically, the project includes community gathering spaces, such as a library, lecture hall, and children’s workshop, as well as museum spaces. The public and museum zones are organized to provoke interrelation, with the public spaces encircling the museum. The exhibition area is fragmented into numerous galleries that are all embedded in circulation space. This approach offers specificity to the gallery spaces yet flexibility for the museum routing, with multiple options for division into smaller exhibitions, expansion, or concentration of the ticketed area. The scattered bulk of the galleries, as opposed to a conventional solution with one or a few great exhibition spaces, provide transparency, with views from the periphery into the center and vistas through the entire depth of the building. This transparency further manifests the wish to avoid the museum being perceived as a large, introverted mass. Specificity to each gallery space is a benefit of the building concept and has been fully explored. Galleries are of various proportions and light conditions – from bright daylight through glass ceilings to spaces with no natural light source, their height ranging from 4 meters to 12 meters. Circulation spaces are designed in a way making them useable as additional exhibition areas. Four fully glazed internal courtyards, each unique in character, provide ample daylight to the center and a fluent border between public zone and museum zone. While it is a very large building, the feeling is bright, open, and free. It provides an unforgettable aesthetic world, one which will point the direction towards the possibilities of continued creativity in the future.