I recently featured a small, modern and unusual chapel in Mexico and here's yet another lovely example of minimalist architecture for a holy house. Slightly larger than the Chapel of La Estancia (this one has seating), but is almost as minimalist and modern. This one is actually a part of the Hyatt Regency Inn Wedding Collection in Osaka. It is named the Eternity Chapel.Michael Webb writes about it in this excerpt from The Architectural Review:From the hotel lobby it resembles a gleaming, sharp-prowed yacht, moored in the water garden and about to sail away. Delicate steel columns support an angled canopy high above the entrance, and a bridge plays the role of gangplank. Screen walls of 1500 interlocking steel rings diffuse light (much like the mesh facades of Aoki's stores), and shut out the intimidating mass of the high-rise hotel. Low-set expanses of clear glass frame greenery. The architect calls his creation the White Chapel, but Hyatt have christened the hexagonal space Eternity--an optimistic prediction for the unions it consummates--and the gauzy white interior with its floor of marble tesserae does suggest a movie set for the after-life. The cross is an optional prop, along with a heavenly choir, but Aoki has achieved an ideal balance of Zen purity and Western spirituality. Dramatic by day, it appears even more ethereal by night, its shimmering image mirrored in the dark water.In the existing site of Hyatt Regency Osaka, the new wedding chapel was completed in April of 2006. As described by the architect, Jun Aoki, "A truncated regular tetrahedron is unique geometrical feature. It can fill up space without interspaces. 4 circles inscribed in regular octagonal planes become a unit of rings connected at points. The units of rings load the chapel as a part of main structure. This is the initial work using this system after we created."Above: Architect Jun Aoki, who also designed the Louis Vuitton store in TokyoSounds awfully mathematical, no?Who cares, just look at it:Just may be worth a trip to japan to get married.
