Akei Toy Museum

George Akei was a collector of Japanese toys, art, and artifacts of early Japanese culture and has decided to donate most of his collection to showcase the value and the legacy it leaves behind. The Akei’s Toy Museum is then proposed to be the host to such a collection to allow others to experience the heritage Akei’s collection offers to visitors.

The design started with a Rubik’s cube. The narrative starts with taking the modularity and the homogenous quality of the cube, which was then applied and went through multiple operations such as packing, subtracting, scaling, distorting, stretching, and multiplying the modules. Then came a series of analoging and recognizing “occupiable” spaces within the given bounding box, as well as finding the quality of the starting toy that was then applied to the whole building. The next challenge is to give the newly created “box” of forms and voids a program as well as adjust such accordingly to create a fully functional museum. Given the site being located in Downtown LA near Little Tokyo, lighting conditions as well as other site conditions were taken in when designing the museum.

Programs used: Rhinoceros 7, Adobe Suite