Teshima Art Museum Japan, Naoshima building architect, Japanese SANAA design photos, Rei Naito artist work

Teshima Art Museum, Japan : Naoshima Architecture

Teshima Art Museum Building design by Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA on a Japanese island.

12 Mar 2011

Benesse Art Site Naoshima

Design: architect Ryue Nishizawa + artist Rei Naito

photo : Kentaro Ohno from Tokyo, Japan, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Teshima Art Museum Japan

Uniting the creative visions of artist Rei Naito and architect Ryue Nishizawa, Teshima Art Museum stands on a hill on the island of Teshima overlooking the Inland Sea. Shaped like a drop of water, the museum lies in a corner of the spacious grounds surrounded by once-fallow rice terraces that have been restored with help from local residents.

photographs : Noboru Morikawa

Structurally, the building consists of a concrete shell, devoid of pillars, coving a space 40 by 60 meters. On the ceiling 4.5 meters above, two oval openings allow the air, sounds, and light of the world outside into this organic space where nature and architecture seem intimately interconnected. Inside one finds an ever-flowing fountains and an ambiance that changes from hour to hour and season to season, revealing countless appearances as time passes.

A narrow path winding its way through the landscape leads from a separate building that holds the museum’s shop and café to the gallery embedded in the hilly terrain.

Shaped like a drop of water, the new museum is a low-lying, column-free, reinforced concrete shell. Though devoid of conventional doors and windows, the cavernous space has two oculi that enable daylight, wind, and rain — as well as people — to move freely in and out of the building.

photographs : Noboru Morikawa

While 182 floor ducts animate the floor plane with tiny puddles, the oculi focus attention on the beauty of the ocean, forest, and terraced rice paddies surrounding the site.

Ryue Nishizawa : SANAA

Museums

Location: Naoshima, Japan, East Asia