Case study of Water Temple by Tadao Ando

The Water Temple on a hill in Awaji Temple, is a building of a series of shaped sensual experience that challenges the century old conventions governing temple design but with a metaphoric presence.

In form, materials, and processional sequence, the Water Temple is utterly unlike the wood structure typical of the traditional Buddhist temple. The lasting image one takes away - not of a building at all - but an elliptical concrete pool with floating lotus blossoms. Ando makes the image, symbol, and meaning  united in metaphoric temple, for in Buddhism the lotus is an important symbol signifying the enlightened soul rising from the world's corruptions, represented by the brackish water in which the flowers grow. 

The approach towards the design is towards a more journey process in the temple. The strategy of gradual disclosure and surprise begins to unfold 
in the long approach to the temple. After ascending a hill, one arrives at a freestanding concrete wall with a doorway cut through. This is the first introduction to the temple and one of the few opportunities to admire the refined blank wall of concrete in relation to 'emptiness'. The visitor approaches the temple and begins to glimpse the smooth surface of the cement wings shielding the pool among the bushes and trees, and a long white gravel path symbolises the beginning of the purification process believers undergo before they arrive at the sacred place.

Then an approach to a distant framed view of the sea, the nature of the site, followed by the pool comes into view. The pool is militantly distinct from the overgrown hills, the cultivated fields and ramshackle farm buildings set below it. Surprise is the effect Ando wants to achieve. Strong architectural intervention, he believes, makes the awareness of nature more acute. Among the bamboo woods, the mountains, the rice paddies and the sea, the temple appears like a pool of lotus flowers.

Buddhism permits multiple belief systems and still, Ando is more disposed to Shintoism and its worship of nature than to Buddhism. He has said he wants to invest his buildings with emotion by bringing nature into them. 

The temple means to create the sense of standing in the air, through the unexpected admission of light and the construction of shadows. The temple's sanctuary lies embedded in the hillside and is reached by a stair slicing through the pool. 

The visitor steps below the level of the water: an original experience that is more than an inversion of the ascent to a conventional temple. Walking between the lotus flowers, one feels that this is a place which transcends day-to-day life, a place where the combination of architecture with nature and the reverberation of the placid mirror of water naturally lead to meditation and asceticism.

The design of the temple forms under geometric forms that are nested within one another, suggesting harmony and balance of the temple. The shape of the pool is carried below as the building's defining form. Although in terms of form, materials and spatial sequences, the Water Temple is far removed from the classic wooden Buddhist temple, but the building shares with the traditional temple is a mystic quality of space. Its forms enclose important symbols, partly veiled and partly manifest, rooted in Buddhist doctrine and the most ancient Japanese philosophical tradition.

Roughly half the ellipse contains a circular temple sanctuary formed by a wall of tightly lapped Japanese cypress boards painted vermillion, a traditional Buddhist color below the pool. This  use of strong color in the temple creates the illusion of a red volume where the air seems saturated with color, an environment of warmness and spiritual with the candles' lightings. Access to the sanctuary is not immediate: once again, basic geometrical elements oblige the visitor to take a route which only gradually leads to the place of worship, offering continual surprises along the way.

Natural light is admitted behind the shrine through windows in the 
exposed support wall where the hill falls away. The improbability of 
finding light after descending below the pool magnifies the sense of 
drama and mystery. 

 The temple concept was not easily accepted. One monk said Ando's two 
Christian chapels  were "sacred," but the forms were "humanist," and the religious symbols were "applied." The temple would never have been realized without a powerful congregation member who championed it. 

The Lotus Temple is imbued with a spirituality consonant with its 
religious function. This transcendent quality redeems the temple for 
some who find the design difficult. Others surely continue to see it 
as a disfigurement of the traditional temple. 

The plastic and spatial results achieved here make the Water temple  expressing a universe of symbolism and colour  which has enriched architecture of expressing the character of Japanese religious space.

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