Ando's Church of the Light
A cross cut into a concrete wall.
Tadao Ando's 1989 Church of the Light in Ibaraki, Japan, is a concrete box with a single, extraordinary feature: a cruciform slit cut clean through the eastern wall. At dawn, sunlight enters as a floating cross of pure light. The building has no heating, no ornament, almost no budget. It has become one of the most photographed churches of the twentieth century.
Editor's Note
Silence, in architecture, is often the most expensive material of all.
