Tadao Ando's Church of the Light

I fell in love with the architect Tadao Ando when I was last in Japan and my friend Kit and I went to Naoshima.  Ando designed the museum buildings there and they are a stunning integration of light, building and art.  Since then, I have gone to see other Ando buildings, most notably the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, which sits lightly on a pool of water.  Lest you worry, I am not a fanatic Ando fan:  some of his buildings here are rather ordinary.  But the Church of the Light is definitely not one of them.  It seduces you into it, inviting you to savor the beauty of light, concrete, and wood, to rest and restore your soul.

The classic Church of the Light photograph is the one you see above:  a cross cut in the concrete wall letting in the sunlight.  Ando’s use of light is one of his trademarks, and this building is certainly a good example of it.  But the picture doesn’t do justice to the church’s mission or to Ando’s architecture, for there is much more to it than that.

Ando uses simple geometric forms in his buildings to subtle and complex effect.  Here, the church is a rectangle with a freestanding wall that slices through one of the long walls and out the back.  The wall doesn’t really touch the rectangle's walls or ceiling, for there is glass between, letting in light from different angles, surrounding the congregation with light and shadows.  The intersection along the long wall becomes the church entryway.  It’s designed so that you don’t see the cross of light until you turn and walk through an opening in the intersecting slab.  That view of the cross is quite powerful and reminded me of what I felt when I suddenly came upon a Shikoku temple as we climbed the last steps up to it.

The church is small and intimate, with simple wood pews sitting on a wood floor that steps down to the altar.  I had heard that Ando had to work on a tight budget – the congregation is small and had limited funds – but I learned later that the church cost only $250,000 to build in 1989.  I suspect the budget forced Ando to make something very simple, and that’s what contributes to its success.  Costs were kept down in many ways:  the wood employed in building the forms for the concrete walls was dyed black and used for the church’s floor and pews.  It’s amazing what you can do with limited resources, a creative architect, and a lot of willpower!

Ten years later, the church asked Ando to design a second, smaller building, called the Sunday School.  Ando used the church plan and rotated it to create an integrated whole.  The Sunday School has warm, linden floors, chairs and cross.  With the light streaming in, it has a comfortable, inviting air, while the church is darker and more contemplative.  Connecting the two buildings is a curved portico, and the curve is used again as a bench in a little nook in the back.

I must have walked around and in both buildings for over an hour, drinking in the atmosphere they conveyed, trying to figure out what Ando did to achieve such a spiritual and spirited space.  Here was this building that looks quite undistinguished from the outside, but inside is this sanctuary, an oasis from the outside urban world, a place for regeneration and renewal.  And he did it with two rectangles, a couple of lines and curves, and by letting in the light.  Isn’t it amazing!