Teshima Art Museum
Ryue Nishizawa, Japan
The Teshima Art Museum is located on Teshima island, halfway up a low hill where rice terraces harmonize with nature and overlook the Seto Inland Sea, composing a beautiful environment. Here is what Architect Ryue Nishizawa says about his design, a collaborative creation between himself and artist Rei Naito:
“We considered a way where architectural space coexists with the artwork of Rei Naito, which matches well with Teshima’s environment. We proposed a water-droplet-shaped architecture, composed of free curves. We thought that forms with free curves like a water droplet could create a single, strong architectural space, with the wavy landscape surrounding. A thin concrete shell spreads to a maximum length of 60 meters, creating an organic, single-room space inside the structure.
“In addition, limiting the ceiling height lower than the usual shell structure makes the landscape-like structure closer to a hill than architecture, and the space extends in a low manner, obtaining a horizontal stretch inside. The shell has large holes to take in light, rain, and the beautiful natural atmosphere: we tried to create a dynamic scene where the architecture is closed but at the same time open between the artwork and the environment. We aim to fuse environment, art, and architecture, where they create an existence that becomes one unit.”
Originally appeared in Modus News 5
Office of Ryue Nishizawa
Ryue Nishizawa, an architect and professor at Yokohama Graduate School of Architecture Y-GSA, was born in 1966, in Tokyo, Japan. In 1990, he graduated from the Yokohama National University with a master’s degree in architecture and joined Kazuyo Sejima & Associates, establishing Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates (SANAA) in 1995, and then the Office of Ryue Nishizawa in 1997.
Ryue Nishizawa photograph by Takashi Okamoto. All other photographs by Iwan Baan and site plan by Ryue Nishizawa