Hokkaido Museum

This guide to the Hokkaido Museum outside Sapporo follows the Sato Takeo Design Office's decision to wrap a government museum floor to roof in seven hundred fifty thousand bricks fired from the surrounding district of Nopporo. You'll hear how two construction firms finished the building in nineteen seventy, and about the cast-iron grilles patterned with bears, cranes, lilacs and salmon set into its walls. Look up at that brickwork as you approach the entrance, where a single grid wall towers roughly twenty meters wide and fifteen tall.