What Is the Main Architectural Idea of the Nasher Art Museum
View of the Chichu nestled in the hillside every bit seen from the Benesse House hotel.
Abstract
Before my first visit to Japan a few years ago, I made a shortlist of buildings and gardens which I wanted to come across and created an itinerary based on it. I decided to make what turned into a kind of fine art and architecture pilgrimage to Naoshima Island in Shikoku, Nippon to meet the Chichu Art Museum. Every bit a Gesamutkunstwerke (complete work of art), the Chichu is a triumph, a skillful collaboration between creative person James Turrell and architect Ando Tadao, and ane of the few examples of a conceptually and physically integrated compages. It deftly bridges art, architecture and landscape as a single, seamless entity, easily propelling it to the top of my archi-bout and favorite buildings list.
Essay
Before my showtime visit to Nihon a few years agone, I fabricated a shortlist of buildings and gardens which I wanted to see and created an itinerary based on it. On my list were the usual suspects in and around Omotesando: Dior, Tod's, Omotesando Hills, Louis Vuitton, Bvlgari, Comme des Garcons, Prada Aoyama, and the redevelopment of CAT street. Further afield, I had been captivated past a the Yokohama Ferry Concluding and a few buildings past Ando Tadao, including the Church of the Light near Osaka, and the Chichu Art Museum on Naoshima Island. Both of these projects required a significant detour off the Tokaido Shinkansen line, which I would exist traveling forth to get from Kyushu back to Tokyo. I as well made plans to spend a few days visiting historic temples in Kyoto and Uji.
I decided in the cease to brand what turned into a kind of art and architecture pilgrimage to Naoshima, the trip taking nearly an unabridged day of travel with several transfers. I stayed in Takamatsu for 1 night as a starting betoken for the long ferry ride to Shikoku. It had been a hectic few days and the ferry provided the relief and a consummate change of stride before arriving at the museum. The landscape of the Inland Sea with its humpback islands was a seemingly isolated world, sparsely populated and sprinkled into the ocean. It was hard to imagine an isle with art installations and a museum to rival some of the best gimmicky art museums in the world here in Shikoku.
I arrived at the SANAA-designed Ferry Terminal, a gleaming white roof floating over a drove of glass-enclosed spaces. The arrivals lounge was spare and minimalist, ane of a serial of beautifully composed transparent rooms which led out to the buses and taxis. The motorbus ride was along a winding road clinging to the hillside, densely overgrown with trees, sprinkled intermittently with cherry trees which had just started blossoming. The hotel appeared as a long rock wall delineating a ramp upwardly to the entrance, obscured by the foliage and the steep hillside. Likewise designed by Ando, the hotel was actually a collection of buildings containing a second museum, the Benesse House. Evidently, this earlier museum was the kickoff try at an architectural concept Ando continued to develop in the Chichu Museum. Ando speaks nigh this serial project in a contempo monograph of his oeuvre:
"Based on the potential of this place and the unique program of a permanent exhibition of spatial art, I proposed here an "hole-and-corner architecture" that pursues to perfection the "architecture merged into the landscape" attempted at Benesse House Museum."
(Ando, p. 280)
Due to repeat commissions from the same customer, the Benesse Corporation, Ando had the opportunity to have an idea with which he was experimenting through a few iterations until its last conclusion with the Chichu museum. The want to integrate landscape and building as a continuous realm resulted in an excavation strategy with the museum being carved into the mount. This strategy likewise dovetailed seamlessly with the works of gimmicky creative person, James Turrell, probably the nigh poignant art in the museum.
The arroyo to the Chichu museum is somewhat obscured in the aforementioned fashion that the Benesse Museum disappears into the hillside, simply the Chichu is at the summit, commanding a spectacular position on the island. Only a series of concrete walls hint at the presence of an Ando museum of cavernous, interconnected spaces hidden underground. Since the artworks are spatially based (including the Monet paintings, which could be said to be spatial because of their scale and immersive quality), Ando designed massive fabricated-to-measure out gallery spaces which reply with the appropriate proportions for viewing, lighting, and circulation. An architectural promenade weaves a circulation route between the galleries, with moments of repose that act similar palette cleansers.
The James Turrell galleries mistiness whatsoever distinction there may be between gallery and circulation because Ando uses his leitmotif detail in both spaces. The detail I'k describing is the knife-edge skylight which reduces the appearance of the roof thickness to a barely perceptible line. The detail finer makes the reading of the skylight seem to exist a paper-thin cutout, and without careful examination i can easily mistake the opening for an illuminated ceiling. This trompe d'oeuil is quite constructive in the smaller gallery spaces, which are less similar the larger circulation spaces and more than like art galleries due to the reduced size of skylight opening, seating and atypical entrance, allowing Turrell and Ando to closely control the viewing feel.
While I have seen like Turrell installations in a few locations (PS2, Queens, New York; Nasher Sculpture Eye, Dallas, Texas), the Chichu Art Museum is perhaps the purest conceptual space for his work that I take seen. The collaboration between architect and artist is seamless and also heightens the experience of both the building and the art. My sense is that the apply of the detail in the other courtyard or circulation spaces is quite effective because it maintains the aquiver illusion between ceiling and opening.
Turrell's work can exist broadly categorized with the works of other landscape-calibration artists, such as Olafur Eliasson, Peter and Allison Smithson, and possibly Anish Kapoor. Their work bridges the gap between art and architecture and farther even so into the realm of large-calibration mural works. While each artist plays with the dichotomy of nature and artifice in different means, their mandate is to re-conceptualize our perception, destabilizing what we take as visual or physical bear witness. Each of these artists needs the medium of a pre-existing crush or what could exist called an exoskeleton from which the artwork his hung (as in Anish Kapoor'southward case at the Tate Modern), installed in (every bit in Eliasson's interior conditions simulation at the Kunsthaus Bregenz) or constructed on (using the example of the Smithson's Screw Jetty). Turrell's work at the Chichu is perhaps the well-nigh well-integrated into compages, the two being indivisible and mutually interdependent.
As a Gesamutkunstwerke (consummate work of fine art), the Chichu Fine art Museum is a triumph, a skillful collaboration, and i of the few examples of a conceptually and physically integrated architecture. It deftly bridges art, architecture and landscape as a single, seamless entity, easily propelling it to the superlative of my archi-tour and favorite buildings list.
Ando, Tadao, Tadao Ando 0: Process and Idea, TOTO Publishing, Tokyo: March 31, 2010
Copyright © 2011 Shabbar Sagarwala, All Rights Reserved. Whatever unauthorised commercial reproduction or distribution in function or in full will constitute an infringement of copyright. Permission granted to reproduce for educational use only.
Source: https://architokyo.wordpress.com/chichu-art-museum-naoshima/
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