Japan’s Spiral Art Museum That Beat the Guggenheim by 58 Years

Decades before the Guggenheim, a Japanese painter imagined an art museum organised around a spiral. In 1881, Takahashi Yūichi proposed an ambitious exhibition pavilion for Tokyo’s Ueno Park. What inspired its winding route, and how did Buddhist architecture inform this remarkable plan? Explore a museum that was never built but offered a striking new way to experience art.