Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art

This guide to the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art starts with a puzzle: how a building of over nine thousand square meters manages to barely rise above Hijiyama Park's treeline. It follows architect Kisho Kurokawa's idea of symbiosis between building and landscape, the village-like cluster of gabled roofs he designed between 1986 and 1988, and a construction timeline written into the walls themselves, running from stone to tile to aluminum. Some of the foundation stones in its base, the guide notes, are ones exposed on this hill on the sixth of August, 1945. Climb toward the entrance reading that sequence of materials as you go.