Japan's Benesse House
Benesse House
Neither a museum in a hotel, nor a hotel in a museum, Benesse House is a shrine where art is a reverential and interactive experience. Visitors are like pilgrims who stop at secluded monasteries to spend a few days among the devotees, living and eating with them and ultimately taking home a new appreciation of their philosophy. So it's only fitting that internationally acclaimed Japanese architect Tadao Ando, best known for his pared-down places of worship, was chosen to design Benesse House.
Benesse gives modern art room to breathe and its supplicants time to contemplate. Featuring the work of a dozen internationally recognized names and a handful of rising Japanese artists, the museum takes a revolutionary approach to displaying its collection.
At Benesse, the art is not rarefied or cordoned off. Sculptures are meant to be touched, paintings mulled over again and again. Here, the guests don't go home at the end of the day; they stay the night. If at midnight you desire to ponder the deeper meaning of Bruce Nauman's blinking neon aphorisms in his 100 Live and Die, you need only wander downstairs, a cup of freshly brewed green tea in hand. And when you wake up in the morning, you eat breakfast under the watchful gaze of a busy Basquiat.
