CHURCH ON THE WATER

Designed by Tadao Ando; completed 1988 Hokkaido, Japan
Tadao Ando’s Church on the Water (1988) signaled a critical shift in the designer’s
approach and for that reason was widely heralded in the international press. Ando’s
earlier residential works were structured private domains that were isolated from their
surrounding urban contexts. The chapel, however, was a communal building designed for
an idealized landscape, Ando’s response to an earlier chapel on Mount Rokko (1986),
rather than for a specific site or client. This is why published presentation drawings do
not reflect the realities of the site, a point that would be otherwise odd, considering the
importance of nature in the design. It is also the reason that such a long period passed
between the building’s design in 1985 and its construction in Hokkaido in 1988.
In the Church on the Water, nature becomes an active force. The sanctuary is
essentially an open-ended shallow box, overwhelmed by a flat artificial pool. When the
only separation between the two territories, a large glass wall, is rolled to the side, it
erases any distinction between interior and exterior. Notably, this is also the only one of
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Ando’s churches in which the altar area is depressed rather than raised, a gesture that
increases the sense of spatial continuity and that is echoed in shallow terraces in the pond.
In the 1986 essay “Mutual Independence, Mutual Interpenetration,” Ando wrote,
“Within a site, architecture tries to dominate emptiness, but at the same time emptiness
dominates the architecture. If a building is to be autonomous and have its own character,
not only the building but the emptiness itself must have its own logic.” There are clear
parallels between Martin Heidegger and Eastern thought that make it difficult to
determine the roots of Ando’s phenomenology, but this character of nothingness, found
in the blank pool, holds an important place in both philosophical systems. It is not God
but, rather, man in nature that is the focus of this chapel. As Ando declared, “To
experience God in this natural setting, perhaps, is to experience the encounter with one’s
own spirit” (Ando, 1989). Elsewhere, Ando goes further: “For me, the nature that a
sacred space must relate to is man-made, or rather an architecturalized nature. I believe
that when greenery, water, light or wind is abstracted from nature-as-is according to
man’s will, it approaches the sacred” (Ando, 1991).
The building was intended not as a religious structure but simply as a commercial
chapel for wedding services. In a country where only an infinitesimal percentage of the
population is Christian, the fashion of having “Christian” weddings is merely a reflection
of Westernization. Thus, many of the conventional accoutrements of a church are
unnecessary, in keeping with Ando’s characteristic ascetic minimalism. With economic
pros-perity in the 1980s, young Japanese also embraced the larger Christian wedding
ceremony as an opportunity for display. As a result, Ando’s wedding chapels share with
several other projects from the 1980s an irony: although he established a critical attitude
in opposition to the comfort and decorative tendencies in architecture of the period, his
works were embraced by the very consumer culture he denounced.
Some critics have implied that this was merely a “radical chic” gesture by fashionable
Japanese, but it is worth noting that Ando’s work was also compatible with a narcissism
characteristic of the time. In 1986, Ando was developing a conception of space based on
the physicality of the body and the use of the walls and floors as framing devices,
articulated in his 1988 Englishlanguage piece “Shintai and Space.” In Japanese, the word
shintai has three meanings; the most common use of the word refers to religious icons and other
objects intended for worship. In addition, the word indicates one’s own body or a course
of action. Had Ando used Japanese characters in writing his piece, he would have had to
choose one of these meanings. In English, it was possible for him to fuse them; he
explains that shintai refers not only to the body but also to “spirit and flesh” and declares that
the genus loci of a site is grasped only through the shintai.
It is difficult not to measure the space with one’s body. Small granite pavers in the
sanctuary are only slightly more than shoulders’ span in length. The markings of
formwork on Ando’s trademark concrete walls are the size of a single bed, and because
the walls of this building are almost three feet thick, the imprints of form-tie separator
cones are very close together. Risers are shallow and benches low, and the chairs for the
nervous bride and groom are fragile perches. Thus, despite Ando’s austere and even
brutish use of unfinished concrete, the building has a delicacy and human scale.
Kenneth Frampton notes that the Church on the Water was “patently influenced” by
Kaija and Heikki Siren’s Otaniemi Chapel (1957) for the Helsinki Institute of
Technology. The building is less often considered in literature today because the concepts
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that Ando initiated here are more skillfully carried out in subsequent works. The religious
implications of architecture as a site for the body in nature are more convincingly
executed in the later Water Temple (1992). The shallow proportions of the Church on the
Water’s sanctuary led to Ando’s many outdoor amphitheaters, in which inconsequential
stages and the lack of a backdrop make nature the real drama—including the first, the
Theater on the Water (1987), planned for another site at the same Hokkaido resort. Even
the avatar-like cross standing in the pool and the framework of crosses on the roof of the
church later reemerged as freestanding colonnades forming spatial filters in Ando’s
works from the late 1980s.
Francesco Dal Co has written that Ando is “completing building after building with
astonishing speed, but only able to do so by falling back on the design and conceptual
procedures he had worked out in earlier researches.” In this designer’s work, it is often
not the variations on concepts that are of interest but their genesis. More than 15 years
after its completion, the Church on the Water remains a source of inspiration for the
architect; it is clearly the model for Ando’s Chapel of the Sea, completed at the end of
1999 as part of the Awaji Island Yume Butai.