Trinity Benedictine Monastery

Fujimi (Nagano) Japan

Timeless Architecture

by Kenjiro Takagaki

Note: Takagaki-san, received the Grand Prize of Architecture, 2002, from the Tokyo Architects Association for his work on Trinity Benedictine Monastery.

 

Back to the Beginnings

Prior Kieran, of the Benedictines, called at my office three and a half years ago, during the cherry blossom season. At the time the Benedictines, who had been living for going on 50 years in Meguro, Tokyo, in charge of St. Anselm's Meguro Church, one of Antonin Raymond's masterpieces (1953), had just begun planning their leaving this familiar home to move to Fujimi, in Nagano prefecture, to a property they had previously acquired there. I was given the job of navigating the process of the building of new living quarters for the seven monks who were returning to their original starting point, a contemplative monastery, and wanted to create a community devoted to prayer and work in a natural environment.

A series of meetings, every two weeks of discussions, first of all on what kind of place the future monastery, a monastery to fit the Japanese landscape, should be, continued, with repeated arguments, all the way down to the storage space of the private rooms and details of utensils to be used in the kitchen. With the change of season we went to the building site, and there the group really demonstated their group way of facilitating, their business by community action as they combined the careful inspections of every detail of the project made by the various members.

Finally from nearly a year's accumulation of meetings, a plan for a complex, consisting of the chapel in the center surrounded by a cluster of gabled buildings joined by corridors and a long cloister walk slowly emerged.

At this stage it was decided that I visit Saint John's Abbey, the US headquarters of these Benedictines. I got the consent of their Design Committee, and at the same time as a result of my conversations with the monks there, I was able to get an idea from personal observation of the scale of the spaces of the buildings, and of the furnishings and entrances of a monastery.

The Message of Marcel Breuer

As the morning fog finally lifted, the bells announcing the time for morning prayer echoed across the woods on the shores of Lake Sagatagan. Through the special intervention of the Abbot, during my brief stay, I was housed in a room which was within the monastic enclosure where normally only monks were allowed, and which furthermore had a marvelous view.

As a result of my brief glimpse of the life of prayer and work hidden in this natural environment of silence, I realized that I had come upon people who were living a monastic life which still today uses as its norm of living the rule of St. Benedict written more than 1500 years ago.

Saint John's Abbey, which, with more than 200 monks, is one of a handful of large abbeys in the U.S., in the 1960's invited Marcel Breuer to plan some major buildings for them, beginning with the church. 40 years later his favorite word, "timelessness," still applies to this impressive layout as well as to his meticulous attention to detail, with the passage of time more impressive.

Speaking of Breuer, I had a conversation with Mr. I.M. Pei, in the last years of the 80's -- whenever I call at his New York office he always welcomes me heartily -- talking about trends in architecture of that period, (he was concerned about the reports of the magazines of the productions of the "bubble" time in Japan), he talked again of the great importance of a "timeless" architecture. To the question, "In this connection, who was the greatest architect of the period?" Pei without hesitation responded with the name, Breuer. Now, ten years later, at Saint John's, I came to appreciate his meaning.

Part Two

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