Beacon of Revival: Naoshima Hall in Honmura

By Alex Hummel Lee
Photography by Jérémie Souteyrat

About 400 years ago on the island of Naoshima in the vicinity of a shrine, a plan for a town was laid out. Called Honmura, literally the origin village, it was conveniently positioned by the calm waters of the strait between Naoshima and adjacent Mukaejima, and it prospered for centuries on fishery and salt production. But with the sudden opening of Japan to the West and its technologies, spurring on the belated but all the more hurried coming of the Industrial Age in the country, the island soon experienced the fate of many others in the Inland Sea. Uninhibited exploitation of their resources for fluctuating economical gains laid waste to the eternal natural beauties of the islands, leaving unerasable scars deep in their landscapes. Subsequently the concentration of power and transition of production to the urban centres meant the gradual depopulation of the Inland Sea. For decades, the cultures of the once-central islands slowly decayed as the remaining aging population dwindled. In an attempt to alleviate this, the local prolific philanthropist and patron Soichiro Fukutake bought large parts of the island to transform it into a new sort of idealistic art reservation, fusing the beauty of the setting and the charm of the islanders and their culture with the dreams of international contemporary art. Some of the traditional abandoned houses in Honmura were gently transformed into entire artworks in themselves, and on the southern side of the island he commissioned Tadao Ando to build museums and accommodation for the growing number of visitors.

The project has since expanded to other nearby islands, with permanent galleries designed by famous Japanese architects, including Hiroshi Sambuichi’s Seirensho Art Museum and Kazuyo Sejima’s Art House Project on Inujima, as well as Ryue Nishizawa’s Teshima Art Museum. In addition to this, Fukutake hosts an art triennial in the area, last time involving 12 islands and attracting a yearly attendance of no less than 1 million visitors, an astonishing feat for such a remote place with difficult access.

For architects concerned with sustainability today, digital tools and data abound, enabling precise models, statistics and simulations of the conditions of a site; the architect may not even need to leave the comfort of the office to investigate a site. But Sambuichi insists on visiting and investigating his sites innumerable times, with his often self-built measuring instruments and uses himself as an atmospheric sensor. To him, reading the Earth means to read material motions. Often voicing his neologism of “moving materials”, he considers the fluid materials of the environment, such as air and water, before the traditional architectural building materials, as progenitors of architectural form. Sambuichi talks intently of the cycle of Earth and refuses to acknowledge a division between human and nature or man-made and natural. All entities are equally effected by and affecting the moving materials. That is why he insists on describing his architecture as ‘details of Earth’, not as buildings mimicking nature but as architecture that makes use of the mechanisms of material motion. For an architect to mediate movements of materials in a construction of an architectural phenomenon, a virtual presence by digital data does not suffice; rather it requires that he reads the moving materials with his own body.

That is not to say that he abhors computers. For most projects, he enjoys a close collaboration with Arup Japan, which also provided extensive simulation and advice for the projects on Naoshima. Computers have their strength in the original purpose embedded in their etymology, as machines to compute data, a repetitive task that could be tedious and error prone if done by architects. They are not guided by architectural intuition and only make use of the parameters given. Meanwhile, Sambuichi continues to perform his own experiments in the office, where a wind tunnel has been made with careful precision, although constructed of cardboard, with smoke coming from incense and the fan being of the home appliance type. With this setup, the air flow of buildings is tested to be further refined by the computer simulations done by Arup.

This isn’t odd, Sambuichi explains. Moving materials are the base of existence. Humans may live without possessions but cannot survive without air and water. And luckily, they are reliable. We may be sure that the sun will rise again tomorrow morning, and that it will make the winds blow and clouds rain as always. Our technologies may not be as reliable. Basing an architecture on the most basic energies is Sambuichi’s endeavour. But energies, in every place, are different in velocities and directions due to countless factors of their situation; and in adapting to moving materials, Sambuichi’s architecture becomes integrally site specific, one may even say endemic, similar to how buildings of the past relied on local material movements. As such, he sees the moving materials as the origin of cultures, that the livelihood and customs of people rely on the available local energies; the houses and towns of people to be read as diagrams of forces. This was also evident in Honmura, on which the Naoshima Hall in all its details is based. After years of research conducted by Sambuichi’s office, a pattern appeared, a carefully planned urban layout revealing a prevailing wind direction and a way to make use of it.

All houses are oriented similarly, placed with small gardens south and north to create a passage of wind. They are laid out in a grid resembling a folding fan, the southern pivot of which is the source of the wind. This blows gently from a valley, over rice terraces that cool it in the summer. Since the founding of the town, the people of Honmura have shared this wind, relaying it from house to house by the layout of the houses. It is the same wind to which the roof of Naoshima Hall is oriented.

Sambuichi saw in his discovery of this ancient building custom a letter from the distant past about the moving materials of the island and obliged to continue its tradition born of moving materials.
Thus embedded in the nature of Naoshima, the building has become a contemporary symbol for the people of the island,with which they may understand and represent themselves as they receive large numbers of guests from around the world every year. They may come to see performances of the unique Naoshima Onna Bunraku puppet theatre, which finally received in Naoshima Hall a space dedicated to its art spanning centuries.

The stage is placed so they may rehearse by using the intimate space of the back of the stage. At night, when the light of the hall seeps through the ceiling to the triangular void of the roof to light it up as a beacon, it gathers the people on the island. And perhaps they may, as is Sambuichi’s dream, contemplate how cultures have gathered across the globe and centuries, relaying cultures based on moving materials from the ancient past to the distant future.