Cabinet of curiosities

We designed and created an exhibition space for supplements to "Gakken no Kagaku" (Gakken's Science magazine) at the exhibition "Our National Treasures: 150 Years in the Future" held at the Tokyo National Museum.
　
"Gakken no Kagaku" began as a magazine for children's education in the postwar era in Japan, and was published for a long period of time from 1946 to 2010.
It was a period of rapid economic growth. People were excited by news of space exploration, and also a variety of home appliances were becoming more and more common around us. It was a time when science realized new things one after another and changed people's lifestyles.
For children, science was an exciting future, and Gakken's supplement, which allowed them to actually experience it, had inspired many children to push forward into that future, creating the world of today.
　
Therefore, as an exhibition space for such items, we created shelves that would energetically proliferate and develop like the future cities and architecture of "metabolism," as people envisioned it at the time.
And we also displayed Gakken's supplement like the "Cabinet of curiosities," the ancestor of museums that collected and displayed curiosities from all over the world during the Age of Discovery.
By exhibiting them in this way, we tried to express to people 150 years later the image of science through Gakken's supplement as "somewhat nostalgic, yet full of dreams and hopes for the future."
　
Client: Gakken, Dentsu
Production support: Ball (Jun Fujisaku)