Although the formal comparison is not immediately obvious, Tadao Ando’s design for the Church of the Light is based firmly upon Le Corbusier’s Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp in France. For a self-taught architect like Ando who has always expressed a passion for the work of Le Corbusier, this is not so surprising.
The exposed reinforced-concrete exterior for this small rectangular church– sited as it is on a suburban crossroads in the small city of Ibaraki, in the Osaka prefecture – gives the visitor little preparation for the dramatic effect they are about to experience inside from the luminous cross that dominates the end wall of the darkened interior. Yet this design by Ando also has an inherent limitation, for if this church is to succeed truly in its eponymous intention, it can surely only do so during the hours of daylight.
The volume of Ando’s concrete church is a triple cube that is penetrated by a raking angled wall which, starting outside from beyond the altar end, then cuts in beneath the concrete roof to create a triangular narthex that one has to pass through before entering the nave. From here the floor steps down slowly, past rough timber pews, to the altar table at the end, where the four quarters of the exterior concrete wall are each pulled back a little to reveal a slender cross of light; another line of daylight separates the raking wall from the roof above. Inside the interior furniture is left sparse: darkly stained timber in the church and a softer wooden finish in the Sunday School that forms another adjacent building within this small complex.
Although Le Corbusier’s forms at Ronchamp are curvaceous and the concrete is left rough, the moves which Ando employs, from the angled wall to the sloping floor and the timber pews, are all taken from Ronchamp in the sense that daylight and its corollary, shadow, become the medium of the interior. In Ando’s Church of the Light the smooth concrete finish and visible bolt-holes left over by the formwork are a nod to another eminent 20th-century architect, Louis Kahn.
