Enlightenment below
Cheryl Kent
Progressive Architecture Vol.74 No.6 June 1993 pp.112-116
COPYRIGHT @ Penton Publishing Inc
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A RECENT BUDDHIST TEMPLE BY TADAO ANDO, SUBSUMED BY EARTH AND WATER,
IS SYMBOLICALLY SHELTERED BY LOTUS BLOSSOMS.
To understand the Lotus Temple, imagine that Le Corbusier's
Pilgrimage Chapel at Ronchamp was completed not in 1955 but in 1220,
the same year Chartres Cathedral was finished. The impression of the
chapel on medieval Catholic priests in France would be like the
impact of Tadao Ando's temple on contemporary Buddhist monks in
Japan.
Few of Ando's projects better represent the challenges and comforts
this architect offers to Japanese culture than his recently
completed temple on the island of Awaji in Japan's Inland Sea. Less
a building than a series of shaped sensual experiences, the Lotus
Temple is a radical challenge to centuries-old conventions governing
temple design in Japan.
In form, materials, and processional sequence, the Lotus Temple is
utterly unlike the wood structure typical of the traditional
Buddhist temple. The lasting image one takes away - not of a
building at all - is an elliptical concrete pool with floating lotus
blossoms. Image, symbol, and meaning are united, for in Buddhism the
lotus is an important symbol signifying the enlightened soul rising
from the world's corruptions, represented by the brackish water in
which the flowers grow.
Ando's strategy of gradual disclosure and surprise begins to unfold
in the long approach to the temple. After ascending a hill, one
arrives at a freestanding concrete wall with a doorway cut through.
This is the first introduction to the temple and one of the few
opportunities to admire the refined concrete for which this
architect is known. A complex sequence that follows, by deferring
expectations, erases assumptions about what is ahead. First there is
a 90-degree turn, a distant framed view of the sea, then a
180-degree turn, and the pool comes into view.
The pool is militantly distinct from the overgrown hills, the
cultivated fields and ramshackle farm buildings set below it.
Surprise is the effect Ando wants to achieve. Strong architectural
intervention, he believes, makes the awareness of nature more acute.
Unlike Christianity, Buddhism permits multiple belief systems.
Still, Ando is more disposed to Shintoism and its worship of nature
than to Buddhism. He has said he wants to invest his buildings with
emotion by bringing nature into them. He means to create the sense
of standing in the air, through the unexpected admission of light
and the construction of shadows, devices he employs with exceptional
deftness. He obliquely suggests his impatience with the
particularities of religion, but he is entirely sympathetic to the
larger, overarching principle of spirituality. It is on this
foundation that he bases all his designs.
The temple's sanctuary lies embedded in the hillside and is
reached by a stair slicing through the pool. The visitor steps below
the level of the water: an original experience that is more than an
inversion of the ascent to a conventional temple. The fractured
compositions typical of Ando's work have been inverted. Geometric
forms are nested within one another, suggesting harmony rather than
the resolved imbalance implied in his other works. The shape of the
pool is carried below as the building's defining form. Roughly half
the ellipse contains a circular temple sanctuary formed by a wall of
tightly lapped Japanese cypress boards painted vermillion, a
traditional Buddhist color. This is the first use of strong color in
Ando's heretofore monochromatic architecture, and it creates the
illusion of a red volume where the air seems saturated with color.
Natural light is admitted behind the shrine through windows in the
exposed support wall where the hill falls away. The improbability of
finding light after descending below the pool magnifies the sense of
drama and mystery.
Only Ando's teahouses demonstrate as compellingly as the Lotus
Temple how this architect attends to cultural expression without
copying traditional forms. Ando says his "reductivist aesthetic" is
characteristically Japanese, allowing him to deviate from tradition
even as he draws from it. Not everyone sees the work that way. The
temple concept was not easily accepted. One monk said Ando's two
Christian chapels (P/A, February 1990, pp. 89-97) were "sacred," but
the forms were "humanist," and the religious symbols were "applied."
Even with Ando's persuasive powers, the temple would never have been
realized without a powerful congregation member who championed it.
The Lotus Temple is imbued with a spirituality consonant with its
religious function. This transcendent quality redeems the temple for
some who find the design difficult. Others surely continue to see it
as a disfigurement of the traditional temple.
For all its sensitive connotations, the Lotus Temple's implications
are not confined to Japan. Together with the rest of Ando's work,
the temple poses a challenge to architects everywhere. His work is a
passionate answer to questions plaguing contemporary architecture.
While plainly within the Modernist tradition, Ando's architecture is
a nonreactionary critique of Modernism's failures. Filled with
surprise and warmth, his buildings avoid the coldness, redundancy,
and economic formulism that drove Modernism into decline. The
architect "resists the homogenization of the world," as he says, and
seeks to express history and culture without denying the 20th
Century.
How Ando will translate this into built work outside Japan is yet to
be seen. His Vitra Seminar House is in construction near Basel, and
construction of the Bennetton Research Center near Venice is
planned. The architect's first international jobs, the Japanese
Pavilion at Seville (P/A, July 1992, p. 94) and a gallery in the Art
Institute of Chicago's Asian wing have not tested the architect on
his terms. These commissions asked him to express Japanese culture
outside Japan. A tougher task - surely not long in coming - will
challenge him to design for another culture and context with the
same grace and skill he has shown in the Lotus Temple.
Tadao Ando took an unconventional path to become an architect.
Without formal training in the discipline, he educated himself
during travels in Europe, the United States, and Africa in the
1960s. He opened his own office in Osaka in 1969, never having
worked for another architect. He continues to practice from Osaka,
the city where he was born in 1941. Ando had a brief career as a
boxer, a fact that could be overlooked were it not for the genially
combative nature of his personality that seems so much in keeping
with his past profession and is the animating force of his present
one. Before traveling to Japan to see his work, I met Ando in
Chicago. He had just received the Carlsberg Prize in Denmark, one of
many awards he has received over the years. He was greeted by his
fans in Chicago with only a little more reserve than Mick Jagger
might have been accorded, and our interview was conducted under
trying circumstances. "I'm always like this," he assured me. Despite
the many distractions, he brought a startling intensity and
emotional honesty to the conversation that are, I think, evident
here. Our conversation was translated by George T. Kunihiro, a New
York architect.