Church of the Light

The Church of the Light is the chapel of the Ibaraki Kasugaoka Church, a Protestant congregation of the United Church of Christ in Japan, in a quiet residential neighbourhood of Ibaraki, north of Osaka. A church school was already running there in 1947, held in a park and then in borrowed neighbourhood halls; the congregation became independent in 1972. The site already had a small wooden chapel and a vicarage when Tadao Ando designed the new chapel as an addition. Ando recounts that the congregation commissioned it from him in 1987 with a budget of 35 million yen, that no construction company would build at that price at the height of the bubble, and that, although he first proposed timber, the congregation wanted solid concrete. The chapel was completed in 1989.

Money was short at every stage. Fundraising delayed the work, and Ando even considered building the church without a roof, open to the sky; donations, notably from the construction company, finally allowed it to be covered. Scaffolding planks from the site became the floor and the benches. A longer disagreement followed. Ando had proposed leaving the cross cut-out completely open to the elements; the congregation refused, judging the space inhospitable for worshippers, and the slit was glazed. In 2017, for his "Endeavors" exhibition at the National Art Center in Tokyo, Ando had a full-scale replica of the church built without glazing, saying that after the building was finished he had visited regularly to try to persuade the congregation to remove the glass before giving up.

The site was completed later, all to Ando's designs: the parish hall known as the "Sunday school" in 1999, a German pipe organ by Bosch in the chapel in 2005, the vicarage in 2010. Chapel, hall and vicarage are thus all his work.

The chapel is a reinforced-concrete prism: three concrete cubes of 5.9 m, which makes the chapel 17.7 m long, 5.9 m wide and 5.9 m high, with a floor area of about 113 m2, roughly that of a small house. A wall angled at 15 degrees, lower than the main volume, cuts across it and separates the entrance from the worship hall. You do not enter head-on: you follow this wall, which accompanies the visitor, then pass through a tall opening in one of the walls.

Inside, the floor steps down to the altar. The altar wall is cut through with a cross that runs from floor to ceiling and wall to wall, lined up with the joints of the concrete. By day, light passes through it and throws its silhouette on the floor in a half-darkness where Ando stages the dual nature of existence: solid and void, shadow and brightness.

The concrete is bare and unornamented, and the care is all in its joints, carried out by Japanese master carpenters. The floor and benches, made of scaffolding planks painted black, leave all the room to the light. The hall originally had no heating or air conditioning.

The 1999 hall repeats the chapel's outer shape, but its interior is the opposite: floor and seating in light wood, larger openings, an upper floor open onto the hall.

It is above all a Protestant place of worship: the Sunday service gathers the congregation in front of the cross of light, the room's only decoration.

The community is small: it describes itself as a small group, largely of very elderly people, whose volunteers used to run the building tours. Concerts help it keep the door ajar: the congregation writes that through them it wants to open the church a little.

Regular tours of the building are suspended until further notice. The volunteers who ran them are ageing, some are ill or have died, and the congregation, which has had to deal with theft, damage, trespassing, litter left in the neighbourhood and complaints about photography (what it calls "tourism pollution"), says it no longer has the means to receive visitors safely. It says it is considering a temporary resumption of tours.

The Sunday service is open to everyone, but visitors are received only after a prior enquiry through the site's contact form, so that the congregation can manage numbers. Requests for tours, press coverage or photography go unanswered, and press and television are not allowed to film or take pictures in the church. Concerts, when there are any, are booked only through the concert page.

To respect the place, come by public transport and never by car: the area is residential, with no paid parking nearby, and the city's traffic rules bar sightseeing coaches. From the JR and Hankyu stations at Ibaraki, a Kintetsu bus reaches the Kasugaoka-koen stop in about ten minutes, one or two minutes' walk from the church; from Handai-byoin-mae monorail station it is about 800 m on foot, following the signs fixed to utility poles. Around the church, keep a low profile.