Pencahayaan Alami Gereja Era Arsitektur Modern 1830 - Sekarang

The modern age brought seismic shifts in worldview. After two world wars, architecture turned from glorifying power to seeking meaning. In sacred design, this meant leaving behind symmetry and grandeur for abstraction, silence, and shadow.

One of the the great example is Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame du Haut, or Ronchamp Chapel, completed in 1955. It embraced irregularity, emotion, and experiential space, using reinforced concrete to create thick swelling walls and a dramatic floating roof. The concrete, left raw and textured, was not meant to impress but to be present.

Unlike Renaissance marble or Gothic stained glass, Notre-Dame du Haut’s materials absorb light and hold shadow. Here, daylight does not illuminate it transforms. Irregular apertures are carved into the walls. These deep-set light wells refract and soften sunlight, making it glow from within. As the sun moves, beams seep and streak across the interior, creating a choreography of revelation. Rays fall unexpectedly: dappling benches, tracing the altar, casting quiet halos that animate the otherwise inert space.

This reflects a 20th-century theological shift toward existential faith, where the divine is found not in spectacle, but in hope.

The next is Église Saint-Pierre in Firminy, France. Begun in 1965 and only completed in 2006 is Le Corbusier’s final church, it stands as a spiritual observatory, a vessel not adorned with symbols, but aligned with the sun.

The church is oriented astronomically so that light enters through specific openings on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, falling directly on the altar. This daylight choreography turns the church into a spiritual instrument and becomes a microcosm of the heavens

Inside, light grazes and cuts the surfaces, turning the heavy concrete into a changing canvas of shadows and beams. The silence of the space is profound. Only geometry, and light remain..

If Église Saint-Pierre looked to the stars, then Tadao Ando’s Church of the Light turns inward toward silence, stillness, and spiritual essence. Completed in 1989 in Ibaraki, Japan, this chapel is the purest expression of modern sacred architecture: Ando’s Church of the Light embraces duality as the essential nature of faith: solid and void, dark and light, silence and resonance, absence and presence. The church is not finished when it is built. It is only finished when the light enters it when the world moves.

The east-facing wall of the church is cut through with a single, a cross-shaped opening that runs from floor to ceiling. As dawn breaks, light floods through the cruciform slit, piercing the darkness of the interior and washing across the raw concrete walls. What begins as a narrow beam slowly expands, animating the space, dematerializing its weight, and transforming the bare interior into a vessel of resurrection. As the light passes through the cruciform and strikes the floor and walls, it creates the architecture. Without light, the building is mute. With light, it speaks in spirit.

There are no icons, no paintings, no stained glass, no ornament of any kind. The message is not told but is felt. Ando’s architecture does not narrate religion; it invites encounter. The silence of the materials, the restraint of the form, and the patience required to experience the light these are all part of a theology of humility and attention.

Across millennia, daylight has not just revealed space it has revealed meaning. From the oculus of the Pantheon to the cross-shaped void in Ando’s wall, light has been the sacred constant. It is symbol and substance, structure and soul. At Alta Integra, we are more than consultants. Our expertise in daylighting is not just grounded in physics but elevated by meaning. We work alongside designers to understand not just lux levels or angles, but symbolism, emotion, and time. We help create spaces where light doesn't just enter, it transforms.