AN AIM FOR PERFECTION

RT museums are like aircraft; no one knows how to build the perfect one.

That fact alone makes Tokyo's spanking new National Museum of Western Art architectural news of the first magnitude, since it reaches so hard for perfection. Based on sketches by France's owl-wise, owl-grouchy Le Corbusier, the museum was completed by three Japanese architects who had studied with the master in the 1930s. It uses concrete, tile, French glass and Philippine teakwood to create a more finished and refined atmosphere than Le Corbusier himself enjoys. Otherwise, it faithfully represents his solutions to the two great problems of museum architecture: display" and lighting.

Architectural design at its height creates interior spaces that are just as exciting in themselves as the fac,ades. To enter a magnificent building is like entering a work of sculpture and seeing it anew from within. Yet such excitement is distracting in a museum, where the works, not the walls, are the thing. Le Corbusier, the most sculptural of all living architects, apparently kept this point well in mind at Tokyo. He braked himself to produce a squared-off, surprisingly unelaborate structure. The entrance leads straight through to a large central gallery, from which smaller galleries radiate up and out. Everywhere, the aim is for a calm, quiet, noble air in the display spaces.

Day lighting of museums is too changeable, except in dime-bright climates, and artificial lighting is too colorless and rigid. Le Corbusier's solution at Tokyo is a radical blend of both. Over the central gallery he raised a huge, tentlike, triangular skylight, glassed on its north side. The smaller galleries have long, rectangular skylights. And to illuminate the dark corners, spotlights are set into the ceilings. Some Japanese critics complain that walking through the building ''gives one a very mixed feeling, like a repetitive alternation of night and day." More spotlights should level out the effect.

The lights should also brighten Japan's knowledge of Western art. Though the collection is not all first caliber, there are some great works, especially of sculpture (see color pages). Valued at $5,000,000, it was put together in the early part of the century by a Japanese shipbuilder named Kojiro Matsukata, who bought largely by lot, and reportedly paid between $15 million and $20 million all told. Because the Japanese government imposed a 100% duty on art works, Matsukata kept the bulk of his collection in Paris and London. The London half was bombed out in World War II; the Paris half was hidden deep in a Norman well, later confiscated by the French government. Of the 400 works from the well, France kept a choice 29, returned the rest to Japan.

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