Simose Art Museum Named the World’s Most Beautiful Museum
Shigeru Ban's museum of eight coloured, movable galleries floating on water in Hiroshima prefecture won the Prix Versailles in December 2024.
The Simose Art Museum, on the coast of Hiroshima prefecture, was awarded the Prix Versailles in December 2024 as the most beautiful museum in the world. The prize, presented each year at UNESCO in Paris, recognises new architecture, and the choice drew international attention to a museum that had opened quietly the previous year in a small industrial city.
The museum is in Otake, facing the Seto Inland Sea and the island of Miyajima, whose shrine gate standing in the water is one of the best-known views in Japan. It opened in March 2023 and was designed by Shigeru Ban, the architect and Pritzker laureate known for his structures in paper tube and timber.
Its most striking feature is a row of eight galleries, each a box clad in glass of a different colour, set on a shallow basin of water. The boxes are built on barges, using the techniques of the shipyards of the region, and can be floated and rearranged to suit an exhibition. A long wall of mirrored glass behind them reflects the sea and the islands, and the entrance building is held up by tree-like timber columns of the kind Ban has developed elsewhere.
The collection was assembled by the family that owns a building-materials company in Hiroshima. It is unusually varied: Japanese dolls, including hina dolls made for the Girls’ Festival, the Art Nouveau glass of Émile Gallé, and paintings by artists including Pissarro, Matisse and Chagall, together with modern Japanese works. A garden planted with the flowers that appear in Gallé’s glass adjoins the galleries.
The site is also a place to stay. Beside the museum are ten villas, some of them new versions of houses Ban designed earlier in his career, and a French restaurant, so that visitors can remain after the galleries close and see the water at dusk.
Otake is about forty minutes from Hiroshima by train and close to the ferry for Miyajima. The museum makes a natural addition to a journey through the Inland Sea that takes in the art islands around Naoshima, Azumi Setoda and a voyage aboard guntû.