Our day began at the Chichu Art Museum, where the precision of Ando’s architecture remains astonishing—the calibrated placement of De Maria’s Time/Timeless/No Time and Turrell’s Open Sky eliciting real awe. And yet the experience was so controlled that it made one long for Dia:Beacon, where light and scale are allowed to shift with time; or the two De Maria rooms once in SoHo, where raw loft spaces kept the works alive in their urban context; or the room-sized installations at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, which read more like spatial sketches, open to improvisation—in other words, spatial play.
As the day went on, the allure of concrete dulled: the Valley Gallery, Lee Ufan Museum, the Benesse House Museum (Ando’s first commission for Benesse Holdings and Soichiro Fukutake, the project that began this island of Ando museums), a house hosting Turrell’s dark installation, and the newest addition, the Naoshima New Museum of Art. One highlight, however, was the Ando Museum—literally his own. This retrofit of a heritage townhouse, with a bold underground addition, stood apart. It echoed two similar interventions we encountered in Kyoto, part of what architect and researcher Waddah Dridi (another generous guide during our trip, based at Kyoto University) described as a distinct Japanese underground approach to regenerating heritage architecture.
At the same time, Naoshima embodies a broader model of art-and-architecture-led tourism: a cultural strategy to revitalise aging islands, both demographically and economically. These museums and site-specific works generate flows of visitors, yet they also operate in parallel to the island’s everyday life—rarely intersecting with the rhythms of its residents. That split between cultural spectacle and local continuity is perhaps what lingers most: Naoshima as both destination and community, joined but not fully entangled.