Church on the Water

Tadao Ando – Church on the Water, Tomamu, Hokkaidō, Japan, 1985-1988

Church on the Water (Japanese: 水 の 教会) also known as Chapel on the Water is a privately owned wedding chapel in Tomamu, Shimukappu on the island of Hokkaido in Japan. The chapel overlooks a large reflective water surface visible through a large window in the Japanese architectural tradition of shakkei.

"You can't just put something new in a place. You have to absorb what you see around you, what exists on earth, and then use that knowledge together with contemporary thought to interpret what you see." This philosophy of Tadao Ando is always evident in its design, since it is celebrated for the attention it pays to nature and to the relationship between internal and external spaces of its buildings.
To the west, the church is surrounded by hills and trees and a hotel resort is located to the east. The church, with a shape of two overlapping cubes, overlooks the water that descends towards a small natural river.
The larger of the two cubes acts as a chapel and meets the entrance of the smaller cube with a semicircular spiral staircase. In order to separate the church from the hotel behind it, a long L-shaped wall runs along the south and east of the buildings that line the edge of the pond.
To access the church, the visitor enters under a glass and steel cube at the northernmost end which houses four large concrete crosses that pull the gaze upwards. The path leads up and around these crosses, then down the dark spiral staircase that connects the largest cube of the chapel below.
Upon entering the chapel, visitors are struck by the view of the pond, the surrounding trees and the hill through the opening glass wall. The other three walls are made of concrete, which also frames a steel cross placed in the center of the pond.

The natural environment around the church enriches the experience, especially in the months between December and April, when the ground is covered with snow.
The chapel is one of the most popular wedding destinations for young Japanese women and hosts numerous weddings every year. The large glass wall is almost always closed to protect from the elements, but it is open to ceremonies that unite guests with the seemingly infinite natural world outside the windows.