The Brooklyn Rail

“What can I do to make that stone Buddha be seen as a venerable presence that feels more solemn and yet also captivates people’s hearts?” When Yukio Takahashi of the Makomanai Takino Cemetery (Honorary Chairman of the public interest incorporated association Furusato Koen) approached me for advice, sights of the cave temples that I saw on my trips to Ajanta, India, and Dunhuang, China, immediately came to mind. The caves were created artificially by carving out the hard earth. When I stepped inside them, I could not make out the entirety of the caverns because of the darkness. What awaited me in the depths of these cloistered spaces were great stone-carved statues of the Buddha that shimmered in the faint light that entered from holes bored into the rock. I wanted to recreate the wonder of those spatial experiences in the grand landscape of Hokkaido. This was the origin of my idea for the Hill of the Buddha.

Located on a gentle hill in the Makomanai area of Sapporo, Hokkaido, the Makomanai Takino Cemetery is one of the largest privately managed memorial parks in Japan. The funerary grounds, which contain about seventy thousand graves, cover thirty percent of the approximately 180-hectare site. The remaining seventy percent of the site is a park with walking trails much like any typical memorial park, but the Takino Cemetery stands out for the stone monuments that have been placed around its grounds. Here, one can find monumental stone forms from various ages and places, including thirty-three Moai sculptures and a full-scale Stonehenge, standing side by side.

What I was asked to do was to propose a unifying landscape plan to better blend these stone monuments with their surroundings and to design a worship facility for the park’s iconic 13.5-meter-tall, 1,500-ton stone Buddha.

The Buddha is a solid stone sculpture that has been carved from 4,000 tons of rock. It is made of only the finest material, and its spotless head, which has been finished particularly beautifully, appears as if it has been polished. Before the project, it sat fully exposed in an open field and appeared to be somewhat out of place. Asked how it could be given a new life as part of a worship facility that would emanate a greater sense of spirituality befitting of its grandeur, my response was, “Let’s bury it!” Building off of my impressions of the spaces of the aforementioned cave temples, I proposed an idea to cover the Buddha up to the bottom of its head with a hill planted with lavenders.

Everything here is embedded within the lavender-covered hill that rises up to the Buddha. One can therefore only see the head of the Buddha from the valley-like approach path on the northeast side. As visitors move closer towards the hill, they will encounter a water court bracketed by walls midway along the approach. The walkways that run along the walls take them around the water before bringing them back onto the original axis. The water court serves as a device for adjusting the mindset of the visitors as they transition between the everyday realm and non-everyday realm. Only after passing through this sacred boundary do they arrive before the tunnel that bores into the front side of the hill. The interior of the tunnel, which is lined with a series of concrete ribs that form arcs of one sixth of a circle, evokes a womb wrapped in darkness. No matter how far visitors advance, they cannot see the full figure of the Buddha that awaits them at the end of the forty-meter-long corridor. They must first emerge from the tunnel, step out into the circular space harboring the Buddha (the Buddha Rotunda), and tilt their heads back before they can finally see the face of the Buddha under the light streaming down from the heavens. I purposely made the Buddha Rotunda as a roofless, open-air space. The raw elements of nature, including not only sunlight but also rain, wind, and snow, enter directly into it. These ever-changing elements of nature richly imbue a divine feel into the space for the visitors’ encounter with the Buddha.

The Hill of the Buddha is blanketed in approximately 150,000 lavender plants. It would have been difficult to obtain so many plants at once. The contractor thus acquired land in a separate location, sowed lavender seeds one year ahead of the start of construction, and nurtured the plants simultaneously with the construction work. The plants were then replanted on the project site once the main structure was completed and the snow melted. Citizen volunteers also lent their hands at the time of planting. This was how the Hill of the Buddha, which turns a fresh green in the spring, light violet in the summer, and silvery white in the winter, was brought to completion.

Although I had previously worked on architectural projects that could be categorized as landscape projects, I had no experience with one of this scale, so it was a great challenge for me as well.

The creation of this unique landscape was only made possible with the combined willpower of all the people who put their efforts together for the project— namely the courage of Chairman Yukio Takahashi, who accepted my outrageous idea without a moment’s hesitation; the leadership of President Toshihiko Takahashi, who inherited the chairman’s will and vigorously pushed the project forward; and the passion of the workers of Ohtaka Kensetsu, who determinedly tackled the challenging project and constructed the cast-in-place concrete forms with astonishing precision without making so much as a scratch on the Buddha. I look forward to seeing how the Hill of the Buddha will “grow” and settle into the site in the years to come.

Hill of the Buddha
2016.08.17
project data
project : Hill of the Buddha
location : Makomanai Takino Cemetery, Sapporo, Japan
client : Furusato Koen
program : worship facility
architect : Tadao Ando Architect & Associates: Tadao Ando, principal
Masataka Yano, Horonobu Wakayama, project architects
structural engineer: Ascoral Engineering
design period : 2012.05 ～ 2014.05
construction period : 2014. 05 ～2015.12
contractor: Ootaka Construction Co.
size : site area : 401,588 ㎡
building area: 402.1 ㎡
floor area : 1105.4 ㎡
height: 11,000 m
ceiling height: 4,950 mm to 5,400 mm
structure : reinforced concrete
finish : exterior wall: exposed concrete exterior floor: concrete trowel finish
water garden bottom: stone (granite)
interior wall: exposed concrete
interior floor: concrete trowel finish