Detail of the project ed. 2016

doshisya-kyotan­abe-chapel / Facet Studio

Design­er  Yoshi­hi­to Kashiwagi
Loca­tion  Kyoto, JAPAN
Design Team  

Yoshi­hi­to Kashiwagi
Koichi Kashiwagi
Olivia Shih
Eugene Wu

Year  2015
Pho­to credits  

Daichi ANO

Pho­to external

Project descrip­tion

Chris­tians con­sti­tute of mere 1% of Japan’s pop­u­la­tion. We believe that there are fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ences between chapels at coun­tries where Chris­tian­i­ty is the major­i­ty, and where it is the minor­i­ty such as Japan; the build­ing of chapel needs to sat­is­fy dif­fer­ent require­ments in a con­text not tra­di­tion­al­ly famil­iar with Chris­tian­i­ty. More­over, Doshisya Kyotan­abe Chapel is built on uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus in Japan –a uni­ver­si­ty found­ed on Chris­t­ian moral but with most­ly non-Chris­t­ian students.
We con­sid­ered that a chapel should be an exis­tence close to people’s every­day lives. In this con­text, a con­ven­tion­al chapel with enclosed walls will no doubt fur­ther iso­late itself from its sur­round­ing. Thus we pro­posed a Chapel with large open­ing fac­ing the out­side world, so peo­ple can sense the inside of the Chapel with­out even enter­ing – for exam­ple by sim­ply walk­ing through the Cam­pus Pas­sage­way. From the Stu­dent Lounge on the oppo­site side, peo­ple can also look into the Chapel and under­stand the activ­i­ties within.
The Water Fea­ture sand­wich­ing the Cam­pus Pas­sage­way cre­ates a pub­lic space which is casu­al, but holy; it is an extra­or­di­nary space with­in the ordi­nar­i­ness. By hav­ing this Water Fea­ture, part of the Chapel is exter­nal­ized and its activ­i­ties high­ly vis­i­ble, for the Chapel to nat­u­ral­ly become part of the stu­dents’ dai­ly activ­i­ties. It is impor­tant for the Chapel to reach out per­sis­tent­ly to the peo­ple, in order to become part of their every­day lives.
Evi­den­tial­ly in West­ern coun­ties amongst the youths, Chris­tian­i­ty is becom­ing less and less rel­e­vant. This could be the result of reduced inter­est towards the reli­gious­ness of Chris­t­ian activ­i­ties; how­ev­er, can it be pos­si­ble that the design of the chapels does not encour­age the sense of rel­e­vance and sym­pa­thy between Chris­tian­i­ty and the youths? Our design approach may not be the only res­o­lu­tion, how­ev­er, a chapel design that pro­motes close­ness to every­day life will become increas­ing­ly impor­tant for the mod­ern society.

Illus­tra­tive project report
Down­load report

Pho­to internal

Tech­ni­cal drawings

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