Inside Tadao Ando’s Masterpiece
by Andrew Kroll
In the small town of Ibaraki, 25km outside of Osaka, Japan, stands one of Tadao Ando’s signature architectural works, the Church of the Light. The Church of the Light embraces Ando’s philosophical framework between nature and architecture through the way in which light can define and create new spatial perceptions equally, if not more so, as that of his concrete structures.
Completed in 1989, the Church of the Light was a renovation to an existing Christian compound in Ibaraki. The new church was the first phase to a complete redesign of the site – later completed in 1999 – under Ando’s design aesthetic.
For Ando, the Church of Light is an architecture of duality – the dual nature of [co]existence – solid/void, light/dark, stark/serene. The coexisting differences leave the church void of any, and all, ornament creating a pure, unadorned space. The intersection of light and solid raises the occupants awareness of the spiritual and secular within themselves.
Read full article at the ArtTour International Magazine Springs Issue!
About the Author:
Andrew Kroll. – Architectural Designer.
Andrew is an architectural designer from Chicago, Illinois. He holds a Master of Architecture degree from Pratt Institute’s GAUD [Graduate Architecture and Urban Design] in Brooklyn, New York. He also holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Illinois at Chicago and has studied at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia [IaaC] in Barcelona, Spain.
Architecturally, Andrew’s interests lie at the confluence of computation and technique in order to derive new formal, spatial, and conceptual constructs across various ranges of scale. Email: andrew.t.kroll@gmail.com – www.andrewthomaskroll.com
