On the outskirts of Sapporo in Japan is the Makomanai Takino Cemetery. The Big Stone Buddha, installed in 1982, stood alone in the middle of the field for 15 years, making a not very favorable impression. The cemetery decided to create a more serene atmosphere for visitors and called on the famous Japanese architect Tadao Ando to create an elegant sculptural complex and ennoble the Buddha.
I suggest you admire the result of his work.
Ando proposed to hide the 14 meter high Buddha in the middle of a lavender hill, revealing only his head to visitors. At the base of the hill is a 40-meter tunnel that leads to a rotunda filled with natural light that surrounds the statue. Once in the observation room, visitors look up at the Buddha, whose head is surrounded by a heavenly halo.
Buddha Hill is planted with 150,000 lavender shrubs that change color to fresh green in spring, pale purple in summer and snowy in winter. The cemetery is open from 9:00 to 16:00 from April to October and from 10:00 to 15:00 from November to March. A donation of 300 Japanese yen is required to maintain the lavender field and surrounding infrastructure. Now the list of the most famous statues of Buddha has been replenished with another interesting copy.
“The aim of the project is to build a prayer hall that would attract more people who come to the stone Buddha erected here 15 years ago. The site is a low hill, located on 180 hectares of green land belonging to the cemetery,”writes Ando,“before that, the Buddha statue just stood alone in the field, creating a sense of some uneasiness. The client wanted to give visitors a sense of the serenity of a Buddha. Our idea was to hide the buddha up to his head in a hill covered with lavender. We called this idea the 'head-out buddha' (English pun - approx. Trans.)."
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A self-taught architect, Ando became one of the world's most renowned architects, receiving the Pritzker Prize in 1995, the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) Gold Medal in 1997 and the AIA (American Institute of Architects) Gold Medal in 2002.
This project demonstrates some of the key features of Ando's work, namely the use of rough concrete, the drama created by the play of natural light and the interplay of interior and exterior spaces.