Paper short abstract:

Le Corbusier's building for the National Museum of Western Art (1959) was inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage in 2016. Today, the building carries a double symbolism, representing universal applicability of modernist principles externally while signifying successful localization internally.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes the decade-long process of having Le Corbusier's building for the National Museum of Western Art (1959) in Tokyo inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list. The building was part of a tri-continental serial nomination at the initiative of the French government involving buildings by the renowned European architect in seven different countries. After its first inception in 2007, the initiative failed twice before finally obtaining UNESCO inscription in 2016. Before the French initiative, the Japanese national Agency for Cultural Affairs had yet to designate Le Corbusier's building as an important cultural property. However, over the ensuing decade, the museum building took on new meaning to the Japanese public, government, and local agents who vigorously pursued its world-heritage inscription. The Japanese authorities originally founded the museum in response to preconditions by the French government for returning shipping tycoon Matsukata's renowned art collection to Japanese ownership after the Second World War. The building's heritagization, first nationally in Japan, then internationally as world heritage, reveals the emergence and full consolidation of a paradoxical double symbolism that Le Corbusier's building for the NMWA represents today: on the one hand, it has become internationally acknowledged and heritagized as an outstanding testament to a universal, self-identical, and uniform global modernity while, on the other hand, it has achieved local recognition as a poignant symbol of an innate national capacity for localization and for Japan's postwar reconstruction and peaceful democratic national identity.