Church on Water

"I believe that a sacred space must be related in some way to nature, which has nothing to do with animism or pantheism."

Tadao Ando

Wrapped in an aesthetic devoid of any ornament, many of the works of Tadao Ando base their richness in the

relationship of the building with light and nature. In that sense, the Church on the Water, designed in 1985 and built in 1988, is one of its most celebrated achievements, in which nature has been involved in the design of the building. Here, Ando manages to create a microcosm that combines simply but brilliantly concepts on the profane and the sacred, the artificial and the natural, the enclosed and the exposed, the emptiness and the infinity.

Situation

The church is located near Tomamu in the heart of the island of Hokkaido, northern Japan. It is a small chapel belonging to the Alpha Resort Hotel, Back to the hotel and separated by a wall L, Ando provides a sacred enclosure isolated from the mundane and the visual focus toward a grove of beech trees located in front of the temple in which a brook runs.

REFERENCES

As a result of his self-leducation, Tadao Ando has usually taken Western architectural references, but without abandoning the roots of Japanese architectural tradition, particularly regarding the use of light, the geometric order and the ascetic aesthetic of Zen Buddhism

The idea of connecting places of worship with water, linking the sacred area with the landscape has a notable precedent in theItsukushima shrine in Miyajima, near Hiroshima. In the shrine, a torii or gate is located in the middle of water. This place is considered one of the three most beautiful sceneries in Japan. At the same time, Ando’s Church on the Water finds in the chapel of the University of Technology in Otaniemi, Finland, designed in 1957 by Kaija and Heikki Siren, its most immediate Western reference.

Concept

Wrapped in an aesthetic devoid of ornament, many of the works of Tadao Ando base their wealth in building the relationship with nature. In that sense, the Church on the water, is one of its most successful achievements which uses nature as an element involved in the design. In it, Ando succeeds in creating a microcosm in which combines a simple but masterful concepts on the profane and the sacred, the artificial and natural, and closed above the vacuum and infinity.

The most notable is that Ando has replaced the front wall of the temple, which usually have pictures of a certain divine religious significance, with a more vivid and eloquent representation of the Creator: nature itself. This will provide a live scene, multicolored and always changing, which runs from pallets sepias in autumn, glaucos shades of winter, spring flowers spots in the intense green in summer.

Ando's architecture is based on a clear geometric order. The composition of the church is based on water at the intersection of two volumes (a prism of a square base of 15 m square and a cube of side 10 meters) that share a corner in an area of 5 x 5 m.

Space

The whole hotel is separated by two arms of 39m and 75m L located on the east and south respectively, allowing the user to enclose the church discover and enter the north end.

The pond in front of the church is a rectangle 45 x 90 m, divided into four 15-meter platform, provides a virtual campus, a plaza with water clearly visible but the user can not touch and connecting the church with nature. At the same time the chapel space extends to the outside, keeping a visual and symbolic link with the cross of metal located in the middle of the pond. The fact of moving the cross off the inside of the church actually increases its visual impact.

After encircling the wall L, the visitor ascends and descends a few steps around a space defined by four crosses, which defines a virtual cube understood as a divine disperses into the corners. The space inside the crossings is a small square of glass roof, which some seats are arranged on its perimeter.

Crosses, 50 cm in thickness are arranged in such a way that their extreme points are separated by just 5 centimeters, the dramatic rise of the composition.

In a subtle reference to the original form that gave origin, the crosses were surrounded by a transparent cube, a metal frame covered with laminated glass.

Next to the chapel lies a concrete porch of 6.2 m high, holding a beam that stretches 15.9 m. This gate symbolically reinforces the idea of transition from the sacred to the profane, while functionally hosts limiting sliding screen between the chapel and the pond. That way, when the weather allows, you can run the screen maximizes the chapel of the intimate relationship with their environment. To avoid interrupting the continuity of the water surface, the lane of the screen is slightly submerged, the distance to be imperceptible.

In one corner of the chapel, next to the staircase and semicircular discreetly hidden behind the cube of light accommodate three waiting rooms and toilets, arranged around a cylindrical glass lighting to get through four glass surfaces (those that form the floor of the plaza of the crosses).

The interior of the chapel is an impeccable sobriety. Five rows of wooden benches arranged in pairs on each side of the room, very simple design.

The walls of the chapel that housed some fenestrations provide a light source by establishing a grid pattern along the concrete seen, typical of the buildings Ando.