Tadao Ando’s Church of the Light. Photo © Antje Verena.

Contemporary chapel design deserves a chapter in the architectural digest of history (consider Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp and Philip Johnson’s original plan for The Rothko Chapel in Houston) and Japanese architect Tadao Ando wrote his own entry with his Church of the Light, built in 1989 in Ibaraki, Japan, 20 minutes outside of Osaka.

If you like the Church of the Light, you will probably like the following buildings:

First, a refresher course:

Photo © Naoya Fujii

Photo © Liao Yusheng.

Some of the design characteristics present in Chapel of Light that have become shorthand for design-y churches (and chapel-like homes) built in the last 20 years:

• Canted cutouts in a concrete exterior shell
• Cool, dark interiors free of ornamentation
• Feeling of an interior vault achieved through planar geometry, not rounded archways like the Catalan vault model
• A resolutely eastern take on spirituality versus the heavily iconic religious structures in the Western vernacular

Onto its antecedents:

Bunker House by VaSLab, 2009 (Thailand).

Boxhome by Rintala Eggertsson Architects, 2007 (Oslo, Norway).

Mourning House by Pascal Arquitectos, 2006 (Cuajimalpa, Mexico).

Johnson Chapel at Trinity School, Butler Rogers Baskett, 2009 (New York, NY).

Tampa Covenant Church by Alfonso Architects, 2010 (Tampa, Florida). Photos © Al Hurley.

by Kelsey Keith

posted in Heritage

tagged church of the light, concrete, geometry, heritage, if you like, japan, tadao ando

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