Water Temple

Few of Tadao Ando's represent the architect's contribution to Japanese culture better than his Water Temple: more than a building, it is a sensorial experience representing a radical change in the age-old tradition of Japanese temple architecture. 

 In terms of form, materials and spatial sequences, the Water Temple is far removed from the classic wooden Buddhist temple, but what Ando's building shares with the traditional temple is a mystic quality of space. Among the bamboo woods, the mountains, the rice paddies and the sea, the temple appears like a pool of lotus flowers enclosed in a thin oval-shaped skin of concrete and sheltered from view by smooth wings of cement.

Its forms enclose important symbols, partly veiled and partly manifest, rooted in Buddhist doctrine and the most ancient Japanese philosophical tradition.
The lotus, symbol of the heavens, refers to the apparition of Amida Buddha, believed to carry a celestial message from the heavens.
Built for the secret Shingon sect, though it later became a meeting place for all worshippers, the project was commissioned by a member of the sect who also provided part of the financing for its construction.

The Temple rises in Hompukuji, a small town in the northern part of Awajishima Island, amidst a hilly landscape which is partially built-up and has no strong identity of its own.
The sensory experience which Ando has designed begins as the visitor approaches the temple and begins to glimpse the smooth surface of the cement wings shielding the pool among the bushes and trees, and a long white gravel path symbolises the beginning of the purification process believers undergo before they arrive at the sacred place.
At the top of the hill, the two wings further complicate the path to the entrance to the main hall, requiring the visitor to take a tortuous route offering a variety of views over the sea and then over the temple.
Surprisingly, the lotus pool is actually the roof of the temple, which is built partly underground; to reach the sanctuary visitors descend a stairway which cuts the oval shape of the pool in two.

In something more than a simple inversion of the conventional ascent to the holy place, Ando employs a series of different architectonic spaces conceived as a succession of theatres for initiation. Walking between the lotus flowers, one feels that this is a place which transcends day-to-day life, a place where the combination of architecture with nature and the reverberation of the placid mirror of water naturally lead to meditation and asceticism.
After descending the narrow staircase flanked by the cement walls so typical of Ando's works, the visitor finally reaches the sacred space, where everything is enveloped in a warm vermilion red - an unusual use of colour by the architect.
Access to the sanctuary is not immediate: once again, basic geometrical elements oblige the visitor to take a route which only gradually leads to the place of worship, offering continual surprises along the way.

Anto has taken the oval shape of the pool underground and made it into a sacred enclosure within which he has organised different spaces, dividing the area in two with the long stairway and assigning half of it to the sanctuary and the other half to the adjacent rooms.
The sanctuary is bounded by two semicircular walls enclosing a wooden structure built on the traditional model of Shingon temples, with a statue of Amida Buddha in the centre.
The sacredness of the room is accentuated by the use of colour and light: natural light from a single source filters through a grating behind the statue of the Buddha and floods the nave, warming up the vermilion red in which the room is painted.

The plastic and spatial results achieved here make the Hompuki temple one of the high points of Ando's career, expressing a universe of symbolism and colour formerly unknown to him which has enriched his way of expressing the character of Japanese space.