Church of Light

The Church of Light, is located in a small town of Iberaki, which is right outside the sprawling metropolis of Osaka, Japan.  The designing began in January of 1987 and the finished design work was completed in May of 1988.  During this two-year period he also designed his second Chapel, though a much larger building, The Church on the Water.  Construction of the Church of Light was completed in April of 1989.  Though in a small neighborhood outside of Osaka, it is a prime example of a piece of outstanding architecture tightly knit into the urban fabric.  The size of its site is only 838.6 Square meters and the size of the building itself is only 113.3 square meters, which is roughly the size of a small house.  Ando’s materiality of the building and actually that of all 3 chapels is very centered and structured around the wall.  In the Church of Light, you have these large, very simple concrete walls, which shape the very geometrical spaces within.  Having something so traditional and simple like the load bearing concrete wall turns away from everything that has been placed into modern architecture at the current time.  When Le Corbusier expressed his Five Points on Architecture, his new ideas that the wall would no longer be a structural element but a mere membrane on the outer shell, severely contrasts that of Ando’s work.  Mies Van Der Rohe along with several others exemplified Corb’s idea of mutually fluid spaces between the walls.  By really placing emphasis on the wall and its significance of the individual really contrasts and disagrees with many ideas of modernity in architecture since the 1920’s .  To Ando, the concrete wall plays into his idea that architecture should confront nature and rather than having the two be synonymous, there should be tension between the two.  He wanted nature to be drawn into the architecture.

Spatial Quality and its Formal Relation to the Cosmos

Organization of the formal order of the church is founded on basic but integral principals and geometric relationships.  The Church of Light consists of 3, 5.9 meter cubes which equates to a very clear 1:3:1 ratio. Ando also use this same type of geometry in his other two chapels; The Church on the Water and The Chapel on Mount Rokko, each of which having a similar ratio of organized cubes.  Within the cubes in plan, circles are indicated that also reflect a symbolic representation to the cosmos.  This cube is important because it is present in all of his work not just the churches.  Ando’s reasoning is that both the church and the home require a central fixed space to arrive to.  This allows one to arrive and center themselves in the world.

 One of the principal elements in which Ando uses to convey his overall ides is the wall.  It’s because of its simplicity, which makes it so important.  There is no expression of symbolism or other derived connotations one would take away from other buildings in their materiality.  The plain concrete walls both separate and join the inhabitant and their surroundings, which ultimately helps to attribute that sense of duality within the architecture.  The wall not only helps to distinguish individuality within the building, they also revive traditional values Ando picks up while on his visits to China.  There the wall is an essential element in both the city as well as its architecture.

In Chinese architecture the wall helps to close the space and allow for a pure geometry to take over when organizing spaces.  Ando saw this as such a powerful notion because he could place more emphasis on the individual and the spirituality of the space.  This extreme reference back towards traditional architecture, as well as the idea of closing off and almost disconnecting from the surroundings, heavily disagrees with the modern notions of architecture and urban design at the time.  Yet Ando suggests that modernism doesn’t have to be what it is thought of in the western sense of the word.  Ando sees modernism as a tool to look towards the future but he doesn’t believe it entails these pragmatic and objective forms that are subtle destructions of traditional culture.  Once inside the chapel, you emerge from a very small, cramped even, entry into an open space, which is the sanctuary.  Here the floor slopes down to the main alter which is at the foot of a large cutout cross-punctured into the concrete wall.  Like both other chapels, the church of light pays immense focus on how the entry is acknowledged as a part of the larger whole of the design.

Here one enters off the main part of the site into this small side entrance delineated by a diagonal concrete wall cut at a 15-degree angle.  The concept here is that one relieves the stresses of the outside world and emerges into the sacred interior.  This similarly relates back to the Japanese teahouses in the effect of kneeling before one enters to evoke humility.

Light is another, if not the most important elemental material Ando uses in his work.  He had a quote stating, “In all my works, light is an important controlling factor.  I create enclosed spaces mainly by means of thick concrete walls.  The primary reason is to create a place for the individual, a zone for oneself within society. When the external factors of a city’s environment require the wall to be without openings, the interior must be especially full and satisfying.”  It may seem almost impossible inspire such a large amount of emotion from a seemingly fairly empty space.  It is because the space is so empty that all of the focus is placed on the light as a design feature.  There is no other distractions within the space to detract from the reverence and significance the light gives. 

Abandoning Conceived Notions of Modernity in the Sacred Realm

Although The Church of Light is a wonderful piece of contemporary architecture, it is based on several key principals that would have some argue that it isn’t all that “modern”.  First is looking at Ando’s reference back to several things set in traditional Japanese architecture, and second by disagreeing with several of Corb’s Five Points. Ando seriously challenges the concept of what true modern architecture is in the urban context.  One key emergence that helps to defend Ando’s work is that of Critical Regionalism.  Set forth first by Kenneth Frampton, he refers to critical regionalism as “an architecture of resistance” and “seeking to mediate the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place”.  This speaks against to what he believed our society had become, a placeless modernism.  Frampton was a big proprietor of establishing a clearly bounded domain, which is why he saw Ando as such a key player. The Church of Light, with a completely enclosed and inward space, establishes a clear threshold between chaos of the Metropolis and the sacred space within.  It would appear to most that Ando was suggesting that the architecture shut itself off from the outside world and disconnect from the urban fabric but rather, Ando wanted to bring the fabric of the city as well as the fabric of nature into the building.  Frampton considers Ando’s work critical because it opposes the current notions of both the modern city and how society interacts with it.  During this contemporary age, other architects have also designed sacred pieces or architecture as a part of their body of work.  Most however starkly contrast the views and ideas upon which Ando designed his church, but there are also a few that coincide with Ando’s work.

At the emergence of modernism, architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies Van Der Rohe, and Le Corbusier all designed a few chapels but they brought them into a secular type of realm.  They didn’t necessarily change their architectural style but rather force the church to accept a secular type of design for a sacred place.  An example would be of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple in Chicago, Illinois.  In this temple, Wright was to design every aspect of the structure down to the furniture.  Naturally through the design, Wright placed in it his own styles and preconceived notions of what the architectural from needed to be.  He wanted to shy away from the classical Unitarian Church and place the design completely in the modern realm with a concrete, cubist form.  Wright had a quote saying, “Why not, then, build a temple, not to GOD in that way—more sentimental than sense—but build a temple to man, appropriate to his uses as a meeting place, in which to study man himself for his God’s sake? A modern meeting-house and good-time place.”  This basically explains how in Wrights temple, he is designing a building in which “god” or the cosmos should be brought  into the secular realm of man and, in turn, it be experienced on the secular realm as well.   This just doesn’t work, and ultimately it creates a disconnect between the spirituality of the place and the certain aesthetic of the actual building.  By looking back to the Church of Light, it is shown how ANdo wants to bring the people or the secular realm into the building and in turn to the sacred realm of the cosmos through a transcendence of space.

Ando still was heavilty influenced by these architects but he deeply sought a new and better way to define the sacred realm. One who particular inspired Ando was that of the work of Louis Khan.  He proposed a sort of blend between the old/new architecture and emphasis placed on symbol and meaning.  These views also shared by a few others brought forth this period of ‘post-modernism’.  The goals of this were to bring back this very tactile and humanistic response to the contemporary urbanism.The views Ando shares about his architecture and its opposition on the culture of the Japanese city has to do mainly from the ideas of urban sprawl and overcrowding.  Ando comments that through the hectic chaos of the city, and the crowded conditions of the urban fabric, it creates a monotony that ultimately breaks any connection one could have between the building and nature.  What is apparent, however, is that Ando reflects back to a time where Japanese culture didn’t reflect the same qualities that it does now.  He uses a contemporary interpretation of the traditional Japanese aesthetics and brings those into a modern perspective.  Ando’s architecture, as expressed through the Church of Light, can be seen as modernist in the light that he confronts formal composition of tradition and he reformulates memory.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that he disregards Japanese tradition and culture, he actually embraces it but in a way where its represented in a new “postmodern” way.

Frampton perhaps best described Ando’s work by stating “While Ando may be ‘critical’ in his opposition against the chaotic Japanese urban context and his refusal to reproduce Japanese elements, it’s his romantic sentimentality and homogenized forms that ultimately undermine this label of the ‘critical’ .”  This basically affirms that Ando just doesn’t disregard the cultural context of the Japanese city around his architecture.  Though he may be against the dense urban chaos it creates, he still sees it as a cultural body and that it is an opportunity to reposition ones self in this cultural context.  Ando creates spaces where the building and its environment work hand in hand to allow the being to find and center themselves in this greater microcosmic realm.