Trust the Japanese to come up with a solution to the don’t-touch-the-art problem. The Garden of Fine Arts with its stunning building designed in 1994 by Tadao Ando, features some of the world’s masterpieces. The difference between this outfit and say the Prado? The GofFA displays masterpieces as reproductions on weatherproofed ceramic plates. For instance, Michelangelo’s Last Judgement which is inconveniently stuck way up high on a ceiling in the Vatican City (itself miles away from Japan) is displayed between two artificial waterfalls (you can imagine how they have displayed Monet’s Water lilies) with 110 plates joined together to form the picture. It is around the same size as the original, only easier to see.
Actually, now that we look a little closer at the photographs though we notice that you have to climb a glass barrier and wade across a pool if you want to touch the works, so forget the stuff at the beginning of this post.
You can catch a video of the Garden of Fine Arts here and more pictures of Ando’s building here at our favourite architecture site arcspace
