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THE TEATRINO (2006) Venice, Italy
of the church. While the consecrated space in the Rokko chapel is the basilica itself, this volume is accessed via an arcade lined and roofed with large sheets of frosted glass that affords a self-contained approach between the chapel and the adjacent hotels. This perspectival volume terminates in a gap and the crest of the hill, thereby focusing on the void between sky and ocean that has long been an embodiment of the sacred in Japan. Only a stepped descent at the end of this Shinto-esque arcade affords any indication of the transitional threshold that opens into the chapel at the end of the arcade. Ando has indicated that this is a conscious reference to the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto, where hundreds of tori (Shinto post-and-lintel gates) line the route to the sacred precinct. Inside the Rokko chapel, the presence of nature is reasserted through a full-height glass wall that occupies one side of the basilica. Divided by an inverted concrete cruciform into four large paces, this window wall opens onto a berm bounded by a dwarf wall. In representing nature as the ultimate repository of the divine, Ando divides the focus of the chapel between a steel crucifix suspended at the end of the nave and the tranquility of an