Light

Posting is going to be spotty over the next few days as we are traveling a lot and seeing a lot.  I am hoping that i can post later today about the museum we went to yesterday, but I really wanted to get some photos up of the Church of the Light first, so here goes.

In the 1980's, the congregation of the Ibaraki Kasugaoka church approached Tadao Ando about building them an addition to their existing wood church.  Others have written more eloquently and knowledgeably about the resulting structure than I can, but suffice it to say that it is an important structure and one of the highlights of the trip for me was that we would get to visit it.  Here is the entryway, a sort of space (here is "ma" again) between the sanctuary and the Sunday school building:

It became possibly the best known Ando structure, this little church and Sunday school building,  and for good reason:  It is just stunningly beautiful.  All concrete, which sounds gloomy at first, but when you are inside the cruciform east wall is so breathtaking and the rest of the space so calming and lovely that even this atheist felt reverential.  It is the kind of space that makes one verbally respond:  I was one of the first of our group into the space, so I had the pleasure of hearing the students one by one gasp as they turned the corner from the entry and saw the east wall.  This is what the east wall looks like:

The cross is simply a window.  That is all, and that is all of the ornament.  Just a window, just light.  What better metaphor than to have the only sacred object in the room be not an object but light itself? Just stunning.  The pews and floor boards are all made out of the scaffolding that was used to build the building, and the concrete walls still bear the marks of the concrete forms (an Ando trademark) so the making is part of the building and visible every where you turn.  The process is the product, if you see what I mean, in a way that I think is so smart and so lovely.  I sat in the space for a long time, just taking it in and smelling the concrete and feeling the coolness in the air.

There is a reductive simplicity about this way of thinking that I think is so appealing, a stripping back to the very essence that makes it a delight to be in Ando's work.  Here is the Sunday School room:

Notice anything?  Yep, the wooden cross.  Feels a bit weird, doesn't it?  That is because it was not originally part of the structure.  It was added much later by the congregation.  It's their building and it is their call to do that, but I think it is such a great object lesson about two things:  One has to do with vision and the other has to do with occupants.

As far as vision goes, having one feature on the wall behind the teacher be an aperture that is again light and in this case seems to be beckoning you toward it is so much stronger than having another object that competes with it.  Now the audience's view is split between the object (the cross) and the non-object (the window), which makes both a bit weaker.  But then there is this:

The building belongs to the occupant now, and they get to make decisions about what is important to them, and for a Sunday school, it is obviously important to have a cross.  Makes sense to me.  So there is a cross.  But it is clearly an afterthought, an add-on.  It can be taken out of the room, unlike the cross in the sanctuary which is built into the room and can not be removed.  Interesting conversation there.

On another note, the furniture in the Sunday school room was quite nice, and although I do not typically make plywood furniture, I thought the form work was pretty cool:

Simple, easy to build, durable.  Nice stuff.

Church of the Light.  What a gift, what a joy to be able to see it.