The Kanazawa Citizen's Art Center belies the truth of the expression that you cannot put new wine into old skins.
The building that houses it may date back to the Taisho Period, but conceptually the art center is of a radically new kind. Open 24 hours a day, managed and staffed by citizen professionals many of them volunteers, it is the antithesis of the kind of multipurpose arts centers built by local authorities that started springing up all over Japan in the late '80s.
Stuffed with the latest equipment, few of the latter have become the centers of creative expression and engines for cultural revival they were planned to be.