Tadao Ando on Awaji: The Water Temple and Yumebutai
On the island between Kobe and Shikoku, Tadao Ando built a Buddhist hall beneath a lotus pond, completed in 1991, and a hillside of a hundred flower beds, opened in 2000 on land stripped of soil for reclamation works in Osaka Bay. Two works, one day.
Awaji is the largest island of the Seto Inland Sea, joined by bridge to Kobe at its northern end. Tadao Ando, who was born in Osaka, built two works in its northern part, a short drive from one another. One is a small temple hall. The other is a complex of gardens, plazas, a hotel and a conference centre covering a hillside. They can be seen together in a day from Kobe or Osaka.
The Water Temple
Honpuku-ji is a temple of the Omuro school of Shingon Buddhism, on a hill above the east coast of the island. Ando designed its new main hall, completed in 1991. The result is known as the Mizumido, the Water Temple.
A Japanese temple is normally announced by its roof. Here there is none to see. The visitor climbs past the old temple buildings and the cemetery, follows a path of white gravel between tall concrete walls, and arrives at an oval pond set in a concrete basin. Water lilies cover it from May to September, and lotus, the flower on which the Buddha is shown seated, blooms in June and July.
A narrow staircase cuts straight down through the middle of the pond. The hall is underneath. After the grey concrete and the open sky, the interior is saturated in vermilion: a room of red-lacquered timber lattice and columns. Behind the altar a window faces west. In the late afternoon the low sun comes through it and the whole room glows orange-red, with the statue of the Buddha in silhouette.
The sequence reverses the usual approach to a sacred building, which rises. Here the visitor goes down through water, in a tradition where the lotus pond stands for paradise. It remains a working temple of the Shingon school, and visitors are asked to treat it as such.
Yumebutai
Awaji Yumebutai, the “stage of dreams”, opened in 2000 on a hillside facing Osaka Bay. The hill had been quarried: its soil was taken away for the land reclamation projects of the bay. Ando was asked to plan a park that would return the bare slope to green.
While the project was being planned, the Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake struck on 17 January 1995. Its epicentre lay close by. The scheme took on the character of a memorial as well as a restoration.
The centre of the complex is the Hyakudanen, the garden of a hundred steps: one hundred square flower beds set in a concrete grid that climbs the slope, reached by 1,575 steps in 235 flights. The complex as a whole commemorates those who died in the earthquake. Around the garden are plazas, water features, a conference centre, a greenhouse and a hotel. The whole is in Ando’s bare concrete, softened after a quarter of a century by the trees planted with it.
Seeing both
The two sites are a short drive or taxi ride apart. The Water Temple takes less than an hour. Go in the afternoon, and in early summer if the lotus matters. Yumebutai needs two hours or more, most of it outdoors and much of it on steps.
For travellers
Buses cross the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge to northern Awaji from Kobe, and a car makes the island easier. Awaji also has Shigeru Ban’s meditation retreat, Zenbo Seinei, a timber deck raised above the forest, which makes a full day of architecture with the two Ando sites.