Chapel on the Water

Description

Influenced by Japanese culture and by Mies Van der Rohe, Tadao Ando’s architecture – and this chapel in particular – creates a place from which to observe the wonder of the passage of time in nature. According to Ando, “the horizon separates the sky from the earth, the sacred from the profane. The landscape gradually changes its appearance, in a transition that allows visitors to feel the presence of nature and the sacred”.The origin of the project stems from a chapel designed by Ando for Kobe’s waterfront, which was never built. The mock-up of this project, which evolved as a theoretical project, was shown at an architectural exhibition in 1987, where a landowner was fascinated by it and decided to make it a reality on his estate on the island of Hokkaido. The location, in the middle of nature, was perfect to express Ando’s architectural ideas. The site is delimited by a large concrete wall running parallel to a large rectangular lake. A large metal cross emerges from the surface of the lake, which replaces the sea of the original project. At the end of the lake there are two intersecting parallelepipeds offset from each other. The larger one, in the form of a stone base, is made almost entirely of concrete, except for the side facing the lake, which opens onto the landscape. The other rises above the stone base to form a glass cube containing 4 crosses, one on each of its sides. Visitors first walk through this space bathed in the light reflections of the glass and then turn and go down to the chapel, whose altar is the natural landscape itself and at the centre of which is the cross. This way, the sacred and nature are unequivocally and poetically connected.