The ceiling height changes from gallery to gallery. The Aomori Museum of Art is a white rectangular block, and inside it the rooms are of markedly different heights, so that moving between them changes where the ceiling sits above you. Tall rooms hold work that needs the volume; low rooms hold small pieces that are meant to be looked at from close range; and both kinds occur inside the same building.

Next door is the Sannai-Maruyama site, a Jōmon settlement excavated and left open, and the two can be walked in succession without any difficulty or any change of ticket queue. That produces an unusual sequence: you look at objects dug out of the ground and then at contemporary work, so the timescale you are dealing with resets twice in the course of an afternoon. The museum sits in the outskirts, about twenty minutes from central Aomori by car, and shopping in this part of the city means the stores strung along the main roads rather than anything walkable.

The height of a gallery ceiling is decided by the size of what will hang in it. A room built without a particular kind of work in mind tends to make everything in it look slightly wrong — too small for the volume, or crowded against the ceiling — so the building was designed with the heights varied in advance and the works assigned accordingly. It is a decision taken before any art arrived in the building, and it cannot be revised afterwards. From outside the white block none of that variation is visible at all, which is the second thing worth noticing about the place.