Teshima Art Museum

This Japanese Museum Has Just a Single Piece of Artwork and it Looks like a Raindrop

Ryue Nishizawa is a Japanese architect based in Tokyo.

Ryue Nishizawa is a Japanese architect based in Tokyo. He is a graduate of the Yokohama National University and also the director of his own firm known as the Office of Ryue Nishizawa.

One of his accomplishments is that he was the youngest person to ever receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which is only awarded once a year:

The Teshima Art Museum is located on the Teshima Island in Japan. It was designed by Ryue Nishizawa back in 2010 in the city of Kagawa, Japan.

The structure is made up of a 25 cm thick concrete shell that has 2 elliptical openings which allow the surrouding trees and the sky to be viewed through.

It was created to resemble a droplet of water and was designed so that it appears to sink down into the earth.

What’s interesting is that although this museum could be used to show galleries with hundreds of pieces of artwork, it’s actually only home to a single piece of artwork titled “Matrix” or “bokei” 母型 which was created by sculptor Rei Naito.

According to Johnny at Spoon & Tamango, a blog about Japanese artwork,

Read more about this design from the architect here.