Using light for spirituality in Japanese churches

Cathedral of Santa Maria
Japan
Kenzo Tange



Church of light
Japan
Tadao Ando

UNESCO Meditation Space - Tadao Ando

4x4 House by Tadao Ando

Church on Water - Tadao Ando

The Church on the Water is located in Tomamu, east of the city of Sapporo on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It was designed by Tadao Ando between 1985 and 1988, and it was built in an astonishingly quick five months in 1988. The site is in a clearing in a beech forest, and slopes down towards a small river. Hills surround the site to the west, and a resort hotel lies behind the church, to the east.The church faces a large pond, 80m by 42.7m in size. The pond steps down in five stages towards the small river. At the high end of the pond is the building, the shape of which is basically a pair of overlapping cubes. The larger of the two faces the pond directly, and serves as the chapel. It is connected to the smaller cube entrance by means of a semi-circular, spiral stairway. Finally, a long, L-shaped wall runs alongside the south and east of the pond-building grouping, separating the church from the hotel behind it.The visitor gains access to the church by rounding the wall at the northernmost end. The entry door is set under a glass and steel cube, and as one enters, four large, concrete crosses set inside the glass cube direct the view upwards. Going up and around the brightly lit crosses, the path then leads down the dark spiral stairway the chapel below. Onve visitors enter the chapel space, they are confronted with a view of the pond. A steel cross placed in the middle of the water, and the entire view is framed by the open face of the chapel; in fact, the chapel has only three concrete walls. The fourth side is made by a glass wall, which can slide open.In this project, Ando succeeds in defining sacred space in two ways. By making the entry route intentionally circuitous, a sense of ritual and purification results, similar to the sufferings and revelations that define the religious experience. In addition, the L-shaped wall, which appears in earlier Ando projects such as the Chapel at Mount Rokko, demarcates the church as a protected, secluded area, unlike and apart from the resort hotel directly behind it. Indeed, the moment of passing through the wall is rewarded immediately with a full view of the church, which is not visible at any other point along the outside path.

The Church of Light by Tadao Ando

Exterior

Interior

Outside

Mass









Church of Light – Tadao Ando - 1989


Tadao Ando’s Church of the Light is located in Ibaraki, a residential neighbourhood 25 kilometers north-northeast of Osaka. The building can be described simply as a bare concrete box with a wall cutting through it at a 15 degree angle. The heavy cast-in-place walls help separate the religious experience inside the small 113 square meter chapel from the outside world. The delineation between sacred and profane is important on this site, which does not permit much distance between two streets and the church itself.
The experience starts with the worshipper making his way past the existing minister’s house, to the back of the concrete church. The intersecting walls create an entry forecourt, forcing the visitor to take an S-turn to enter. Inside, the space is dominated by the glowing cross at the end of the nave. The bare concrete walls have no decorations that would mitigate the experience. The starkness creates an isolated, ascetic feeling inside the church. The interior is perhaps claustrophobic, with views to the outside only available through the 20 cm gap in the concrete wall that is the cross. The dominance of the cross is paramount in the church, requiring the pastor to preach from one side, which took some convincing on Ando’s part.
Ando's Church of the Light was a very low-budget affair, where the starkness of the interior was a necessity, and not so much an aesthetic choice. The contractor donated the construction of the roof when funds ran out and the church pews are made of wood salvaged from the concrete formwork. Yet the simplicity of the church is its beauty — a highly ordered, extremely focussed space only steps away from the workaday residential neighbourhood outside.