The Teshima Yokoo House transforms three renovated structures on Teshima Island into a compact museum of modern art. Artist Tadanori Yokoo developed the concept, and Yuko Nagayama & Associates handled the architecture. Set in Ieura, the island’s port district on the Seto Inland Sea, the project turns the main house, warehouse, and outhouse into a sequence of vivid exhibition spaces. Red glass, mirrors, a stone garden, a pond, and a cylindrical tower fold the existing buildings into a spatial collage that echoes Yokoo’s recurring themes of life and death.
Teshima Yokoo House – renovated homes turned art museum
With this project, the renovated houses became a cultural destination for a small port community with an aging population. Rather than erase the old buildings, the design works with their scale and layout, using wood, concrete, intense color, reflection, and garden elements. The result is intimate rather than monumental: visitors move through rooms where architecture, art, and landscape are closely layered.
Renovated homes by Yuko Nagayama
Entering the renovated houses of Teshima Yokoo House gives visitors an unusually immersive experience. Transparent red glass panels, large mirrors, and tightly composed rooms make color and space feel unstable and alive. The museum’s theme of "life and death" runs through both the artworks and the architecture.
Modern art exhibitions in a renovated home
The vivid red glass creates a trompe l'oeil effect and shifts the way visitors perceive color. Through the panes, the garden, tiles, pond, and artworks take on a different tone, while reflective surfaces blur the boundaries between room, artwork, and landscape.
Teshima Yokoo House by Yuko Nagayama
Red glass intensifies the artistic effect
Reflective surfaces blur the boundaries between the wall, floor and ceiling
Optical shifts create a unique atmosphere for visitors
The red room changes the perception of color
Artworks in the red room explore subjective color perception
Small patio with a pond
Street facade
Teshima Yokoo House in the Seto Inland Sea, Japan
Site plan
Photos: Nobutada Omote, Daichi Ano
Anna Lohan
miranda_shida
Peter Dark
Theresa V. Adams
