Tadao Ando (Osaka, Japan, 81 years old) has been participating as an architect in activities developed on the island of Naoshima since 1989. Then he supervised the planning of an international summer camp promoted by the textbook publisher Tetsuhiko Fukutake, mentor of the Benesse project Art Site Naoshima, which transformed this fishing island into one of the most special and select open-air museums in the world.
There he implanted an ideal that his son Soichiro would later follow, and which is based on two maxims: that “culture and ethics make up a country” and “the economy is a servant of culture”.
In 1992, Ando had the idea of uniting a museum and a hotel called Benesse House.
Benesse, a word of Latin origin, means “to live well”, and the place he names continues to be an open door to a philosophy of life in which art, nature, history and architecture come together.
A space to be appreciated with the body and mind.
In 1995 (the year in which he received the Pritzker Prize) the famous Oval house was added, which can only be accessed if you spend the night in it.
In 1999, in the Honomura district and in collaboration with James Turrell, he created Minamidera, a building designed to accommodate the size of Turrell's works.
Minamidera (literally "temple of the south") preserves the idea that the temples that were erected here were an emotional support for the people.
The Oval House of Naoshima, an exclusive accommodation for art lovers.Shutterstock
Ando's architecture continued to play a central role in the development of Naoshima's artistic project into the 21st century.
In 2004 she completed the Chichu Art Museum, in 2006 the Benesse Park Beach house, and in 2010 the Lee Ufan Museum.
Her buildings seem to have arisen organically one by one and respect for the environment is taken to the extreme.
In 2014, in the same district of Honmura, among traditional houses built 100 years ago, Ando opted to preserve and modify an old wooden house and the wall that surrounds it to install his own Museum.
The Ando Museum thus fills the original structure with new life through its concrete interior.
The exhibition space, which combines the old and the new, wood and concrete, light and dark, is a good place for,
existing minka
(traditional Japanese house) and land.
“When a building cannot be seen,” Ando wrote, “the quality of its space becomes the only thing that matters.
It will please me that visitors can perceive in this modest building the essence of what I consider architecture”.
ChiChu Art Museum designed by Tadao Ando. Construction Photography/Avalon (Getty Images)
Undoubtedly, the best example to verify this idea of architecture is Chichu Art Museum, which not by chance means "underground".
Ando had the intention of designing a building without an exterior in order to preserve the landscape as much as possible.
It remains one of the most exciting visits.
Here you can see the reason why this marvel exists: Monet and his water lilies, because Fukutake wanted to create the best possible space
for that founding painting in his collection,
Water-Lili Pond .
Communications director Yukari Stenlund says that the acquisition of this work inspired the Chichu Art Museum.
“To offer a better understanding of Monet's great decorative work from a contemporary perspective, we selected land art
artists Walter di Maria and James Turrell
as companions ,” she explains.
“The scale of his work is comparable to Monet's, and the works they produced for this museum occupy entire rooms.
All three take ideas they have arrived at through an interpretation of nature and translate them into art."
Nothing more certain.
The coexistence of Monet's works alongside those of Turrell (
Afrum, Pale Blue; Open Field
and
Open Sky)
and Di Maria's installation
Seen / Unseen Known / Unknown
make up a luminous artistic experience in the literal sense of the term, since all they try to transform nature into colour, emptiness or light, as well as to objectify the latter, to show it.
A detail from the ChiChu Art Museum. Construction Photography/Avalon (Getty Images)
The floor of the Monet Space is made of white marble from the legendary quarries of Carrara, the Italian region that also supplied the material to Michelangelo and the great sculptors of the Baroque.
Cut into two-centimeter cubes, there are some 700,000 pieces embedded in the ground.
Monet used the water lily pond as a mirror, representing the reflection of the surrounding trees on the surface of the water, and from this room one manages to teleport to Giverny to, in the face of such an aquatic landscape, prove once again the reason for the critic who said more than of a century "No more earth, no more sky, a now without limits".
Llàtzer Moix, in his book
Palabra de Pritzker,
introduced his conversation with Tadao Ando, recalling the achievements of Naoshima, "where he displayed an enviable creative maturity through an architectural exercise of essentiality and integration into nature."
In the Chichu Art Museum it is perceived how Tadao Ando has never stopped thinking about geometry, in its simple forms, considering the relationships between these figures.
Everything refers to elementary shapes: squares, circles, triangles.
His favorite material, as always, is concrete, polished to a smooth, pure texture.
Another material is added to this material: light, which generates clarity, shadows, vibrations and atmospheres.
Floral and Botanical Gardens designed by Tadao Ando.Shutterstock
Its recent Valley Gallery is probably the building that best embraces the environment and for whose setting Tadao Ando even selected the species of flowers and plants.
It has something of a sanctuary.
It is a structure along a valley impeccably connected to the space that surrounds it, generating a joint experience for the traveler, who inevitably assumes the brotherhood between landscape and architecture and the change that the passing of the seasons causes in them.
Ando explained: "I tried to create a space that had the strength of glass, even though it is small."
Says Yukari Stenlund: “The architecture features flat sides in the shape of a trapezoid, an angle of 30 degrees to fit the shape of the valley, a double-walled structure, and iron roofs with slits and notches.
Although the interior space of the gallery is introspective, the structure is half open to the outside, like the coastal galleries on the beach, allowing us to directly feel the movements of natural energies, such as sunlight and wind.”
Both inside and outside the gallery,
Narcissus Garden has been installed,
a monumental work that Yayoi Kusama exhibited for the first time in the grass courtyard of the Giardini della Biennale in Venice in 1996. The succession of reflective mirror balls reveal the surrounding landscape and the visitor feels that he is united with nature and could expand in it infinitely.
It is an installation with a presence inside, outside and in the water of the garden.
Yayoi Kusama is the artist responsible for the two most famous pumpkins on the island, those installed in the port of Ninayoura and on Gotanji beach, both of which are so sought after by respectful, dedicated and discreet tourism.
'Full Moon Stone Circle', a work by Richard Long at the Benesse Museum in Naoshima.Education Images (Universal Images Group via Getty)
Inside the Bennese Art Museum, Yukari Stenlund who explains that this iconic Ando building is the opposite of a museum.
“To begin with, there is no artificial light and there are huge windows. Where have you seen a museum that takes so much advantage of sunlight?... Those light bulbs that you see were installed later, when it was decided that the hotel residents should have the doors Museum open all night.
There are no stairs”, he adds, “just ramps, to appreciate the works without distractions”.
Stenlund shows with great interest part of the permanent collection, which includes figures such as Richard Long, "someone who goes to nature to look for materials", the Chinese Wang Guany, the subtle and combative Chang Xiaogang and the multimedia Bruce Nauman .
In her office, the communication manager shows the design of the museum's original logo by the designer and illustrator Shin Matsunaga and recalls that "this was an island in the Seto Inland Sea where no one came and everyone left. young people who could despite enjoying a very profitable refinery.
The Fukutake project transformed the landscape, the mentality, the economy and the migratory flow”.
In case Ando's ability to generate unique atmospheres had not been clear, it is worth going to the recent extension of the Beach House or Benesse House Area, which has given rise, in 2022, to the Hiroshi Sugimoto Gallery, where the exhibition has been installed permanent
Time Corridors
by this New York-based sculptor and photographer who began photographing movie theater interiors and is today one of the great creators of photographic horizons.
The building was renovated by the New Materials Research Laboratory, headed by Hiroshi Sugimoto himself.
Visitors can sip matcha tea around the "Three Divine Trees" table created especially for the building while admiring, behind the glass, one of Sugimoto's masterpieces: the
Glass tea house 'Mondrian'
whose transfer has been recent and definitive.
Tadao Ando's space at the Lee Ufan Museum in Naoshima.Shutterstock
Even so, Ando is not all that glitters in Naoshima.
Architects like Kazuyo Sejima from the Sanaa studio have left their mark in recent years on an island whose mission seems to be to soothe the spirits of those who visit it.
With tourism as the main economic source, ferry trips increased to the point that it was necessary to build a terminal that would centralize access by sea and improve the flow with the port of Tamano, in Okayama.
The place chosen for its location was the port of Miyanoura.
Sanaa, the studio founded by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, has conceived a thin sheet metal roof arranged over the wide esplanade of the boarding dock, generating a light volume on a single floor that houses inside, wrapped in glass, the facilities of the terminal:
souvenirs
, customer service office and ticket sales, waiting room open to the dock and parking area.
Faithful to their idea of looking for an architecture that can evolve with its context, the lightness of the volume derives from the thinning of the roof — barely 15 centimeters thick — and the intention was to create a point of reference for natives and travelers.
There is no simpler and more comfortable ferry terminal.
More fun and just as light is the bicycle parking that the same study has erected in the port of Honmura, where some weightless bubbles, some clouds, allow the traveler to take shelter inside.
The creativity and originality of the piece has managed to position it as a new attraction on the island of art.
At five in the afternoon, when the last ferry leaves for Tamano, the silence is even more generous and spreads its invisible nets between the evening breeze and the beaches, which are revealed as very appropriate vanishing points to try the specialty of the island: salt ice cream.
Yes, salt dried in the sun
made in Naoshima
, frankly at the height of the landscape.
The Naoshima passenger terminal, in the form of a cloud.ERIC LAFFORGUE (Corbis via Getty Images)