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. ...