Reaction paper to the Baek article History Essay Paper

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The church of the light is one of the famous oeuvres of Tadao Ando, an influential Japanese self-taught architect. This work was built in the year 1989 which sits on a quiet residential suburb in Ibaraki near Osaka, Japan. Ando created the Church of Light from a renovation of an existing Christian compound. The church’s congregation financed the construction of the church but the budget was very low. To address the dire situation, Ando used inexpensive materials to address this problem. Thus, the Church of Light was built.
The building was designed to have a rectangular concrete volume (triple cube), with an oblique wall dividing the building into a chapel and a small triangular space as an entry point. To put it simply, the building is somewhat pierced with an obliquely-angled wall. At the points of intersection, glazed openings were placed to bring light into the dark interior of the premise. If you look at the inside, all you can see is darkness. However, at the very front, you will be surprised to see a light that forms a cross. The whole height and width of that wall in front of you forming behind the altar is a cross formed by a horizontal and vertical glazed opening CITATION Fra91 \l 1033 (Frampton, 1991). The minimum amount of openings intensified the power of the light emanating from the crucifix formed. The glowing light is a very radiant one because it is the only light that you can see inside this work of art. The main elements of the design and construction are wood and reinforced concrete. The tables and the floor are all made from the wood while the walls were from a bare concrete wall, Ando’s favorite material. The bare concrete walls could show a building’s history by the cracks and chips that take years to be seen. With the materials used for the creation of this building, you can see that the architect is quite a simple person who is not that materialistic when it comes to his creations.
Ando has a different way of looking at the geographical area where the buildings were built. It is not merely just a place but a place where many layers of memories and histories are
imprinted on. As Ando said, a whispering voice can be heard in that place that describes the forces within that area. With all those, the works that Ando creates carry the spirit that has been integrated with it which will make that place pure to the later generations that will come.
The overall look of the building if you look at the exterior or the outside will not show the contemporary church architecture seen in other places that also value Christianity. The different representations and expressions of this building make it an interesting architectural design to people with abstract and artistic minds. Even on the inside, the place does not look like the usual Church with many statues and images of the different saints. The only thing that you could see is the cross which would be the most cliché symbol to use to make the observer think that the building is a church. It is quite intriguing for a devoted religious person to see a Church with just the Cross inside because it is simply different from the norm and the usual...