Contemporary Island Historiography and Environmental Codifications of Architecture: The Art Museum on Naoshima

This paper puts forward an architectural history of the Benesse art museums on Naoshima within their context of environmental framing, within the theoretical framework of island relationality. By drawing connections to the planetary consciousness and imaginaries that emerged globally in the 1960s growing public environmental consciousness, I utilize Pugh’s concept of island relationality to view the architecture and its geometry as codifi ed forms signifying the planetary consciousness of the Anthropocene. This is then used to build on well-documented research on the Benesse Art Site project and its neocolonial effects on Naoshima’s small communities by linking its built environment to historical developments that are pertinent to today’s concerns around climate change and sustainability within architectural, museum, and island studies. This theoretical framework redefines the aesthetic and geometric qualities of the museums through a planetary scale that reveals a multiplicity of local, global, and planetary codifications of neocolonial activity in their architectural forms. Finally, I discuss how revealing these codifications has the potential to ecologically orient local critical discussions around heritage.