Chichu Art Museum

Naoshima already held Ando's earlier Benesse House when Soichiro Fukutake asked for a museum built entirely for three artists: Claude Monet's water-lily paintings, and permanent installations by Walter De Maria and James Turrell. Ando's answer was to bury it. Roughly sixty percent of the floor area sits below the hillside, reached by an open-air ramp and a sequence of courtyards that are the only rooms with a visible sky; the exhibition spaces themselves are lit solely by skylights and angled light wells, no artificial lighting at all in the Monet room. Concrete throughout is Ando's usual fair-faced finish, tie-holes exposed, but here the material is deliberately secondary — the museum's own literature describes the building as existing 'to make people conscious of the changeability of nature.' The five Monet canvases were bought specifically for the room built to hold them, an oval space lined in tiny white tile. Opened in July 2004, the museum admits visitors by timed ticket to protect the controlled daylight the whole design depends on.