Day 5: Chapel on Mount Rokko and Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art

I heard about this architect, Tadao Ando, does a lot of great buildings in Kobe and one was a small wedding Chapel. Known simply as Chapel on Mount Rokko, completed in 1986, it rest just outside Kobe. You walk through this non-descript hotel, like any other hotel and past a small Koi pond to a tunnel 10 yards long of frosted glass with plain concrete frame. At the end is an exit onto nature with no church in sight until you reach the end. On the right there is a dark vestibule, more concrete… you can’t escape this tying bounds to earth.

Just a hint of light marks the boundary between the corridor and the center of worship. The Chapel opens upward with a high ceiling and west wall predominantly of glass that views a small sculpted lawn. There where no light fixtures, which I found remarkably odd for a church, plenty of light is provided by the large side window. However, this light is solely for the wedding guests, the alter is not left in darkness though, instead it is provided almost magically from a long and unseen vertical slit in the ceiling.

The Chapel on Mount Rokko is quite an interesting sight to see, a wide departure from most of the traditional churches I’ve seen in the states. The mixture of the temptation of nature and inclusion of only natural light play wonderfully. The sun truly rules this church; its passage redefines the space and transforms it from cold concrete to a house of spirituality.

After the Chapel I had decided to make a visit to another of Tadao Ando’s buildings the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art (built in 2002), one of my favorite types of buildings after libraries, theaters and amusement parks. The big selling point it how it “fuses art, music and dance through a series of complex spatial experiences”, according to the brochure. The first striking feature is the fact that the museum is made up of 3 parallel concrete rectangles, each with a white granite platform and there own grand stairs and plazas facing the waterfront.

Each entrance hall has a wonderful meditative atmosphere, surprising from the sea of concrete that surrounds you, and is filled with sunshine from glazed terraces. Each building has galleries, auditoriums and studio spaces exhibiting a collection that tops 7,000 pieces, including Ryohei Koiso, Heizo Kanayama and even Henry Moore and Rodin. With the constant shifting of light throughout the day the museum becomes quite a maze, nothing as multifaceted as La Louvre but the map came in extra handy.

The whole complex is designed to draw your eye out to sea and away from the city. Toward the waterfront there are overhanging roofs that create protective outdoor plazas and transparent curtain wall facades, however, if you look to Kobe your meet with only traffic and dark metal.

I found it interesting that Tadao Ando used the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art as a preliminary design testing ground for the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth which was completed shortly afterward.