St. Mary's Cathedral
— — a stainless cross folded out of the sky.
Not only on a wall.
“Kenzō Tange's 1964 cathedral for the Archdiocese of Tokyo. Eight hyperbolic-paraboloid walls of stainless steel rise from a cruciform plan, meeting overhead in a cross of skylight. Inside, the concrete is left raw and the daylight falls in a thin vertical seam above the altar. The original wooden cathedral on this site burned in the 1945 firebombing.
St. Mary's Cathedral, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
St. Mary's Cathedral stands in Sekiguchi, in Tokyo's Bunkyō ward, on a slope overlooking the Kanda River. It is the seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Tokyo. The building was completed in 1964 to a design by Kenzō Tange, who won an invited competition against Kunio Maekawa and Yoshinobu Ashihara. It replaced an earlier wooden Gothic-Revival cathedral destroyed in the March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo. The cruciform plan measures roughly fifty-five metres on the long axis.
The eight curving walls are reinforced concrete clad in brushed stainless steel, the first major use of the material on a Japanese building of this scale. Tange chose stainless because Tokyo's atmosphere would have darkened raw concrete within a decade; the steel keeps the cross legible from the street below. Inside, the walls remain raw concrete with the formwork marks visible. The free-standing bell tower beside the nave rises about sixty metres.
Daylight enters along the four seams where the paraboloid walls meet overhead, forming a cross-shaped slot of sky above the altar. There are no traditional windows along the nave. The room reads as dim from the entrance and slowly brightens as the eye walks toward the crossing, where the light pools on the raw concrete floor. Tange tuned the geometry so the cruciform slot reads as a cross from any pew, no matter where the worshipper sits.