ANDO MUSEUM – NAOSHIMA

The drawing above most likely looks incomprehensible.  And I think that’s ok, given the initial incomprehension that you experience when you enter this building.

The Ando Museum in Naoshima, Japan, one of the Art House Projects, is a very complex puzzle.  The ostensible purpose of the building is that it is a museum dedicated to the famous Japanese architect, Tadao Ando.  The basic design parti is that there has been a massive and forceful interior intervention inside a traditional Japanese house.  When you first enter, you feel like it is indeed the classic, wooden residence that the exterior suggests.  Yet when you proceed to the next space, you are surrounded by massive, tilting, polished concrete planes.  Interior light is bouncing around off of the concrete.  There are long horizontal slits let into the concrete to permit a view more or less thru the building.  And, honestly, all you can do is wonder around inside, marveling of the sensory experience.

It is only a bit later do you realize that there are traditional museum displays about Ando’s buildings.  My impression is that these displays could be easily removed from the building and nothing would be lost.  Because the museum, if that word even applies to this building, is simply the emotional reactions that you have inside to the concrete sculpture that has been created.   That is to say, I believe that the interior is so powerful, that the architectural experience is, indeed, all the museum function that is required.  It is as if the Guggenheim in NYC would have all of the art removed, and then the museum would be purposed as a museum about Frank Lloyd Wright.

My drawing tries to capture the interjection of the interior concrete forms with the traditional wooden structure.  And then I overlaid that, in orange,  with my impression, or at least some sort of impression, of how the interior views and natural light are intertwined.

I did not include any interior photos of the museum that I took because there were strict rules that you were not allowed to take any.  Whenever anyone tells me that I can’t take photos, I immediately have issues that I then have to work thru.  And I typically work thru this issue by, yes, proceeding to take photos.  Which I did.  With my phone, as you can surreptitiously take photos with a phone far easier than you can with your camera.  In fact, I think that one of the other tourists in the building saw me taking photos, went and told on me, which caused one of the docents at the entry to sort of stomp into the room I was in and glare at me.  They probably thought:  Irritating American!  How right they were.

I did the drawings below of the same building before I did the one above.  Obviously, this building has become somewhat of a preoccupation.