Tadao Ando's Church of the Light is one of the buildings of contemporary architecture that says the most with the least: a small, almost empty concrete box and a single gesture of light entering it. Contrary to the sculptural complexity of Ronchamp, Ando produces the mystical effect from absolute simplicity.

The church is a simple rectangular prism; its walls are of the smooth, silky exposed concrete that is Ando's signature — the formwork marks and tie-holes left in a flawless grid, with no other ornament. The space is dim and silent. Then the reinforced-concrete wall behind the altar is cut, end to end, by two thin slits — horizontal and vertical — forming a cross. Light from outside flows in through this cross-shaped void and forms, on the dark concrete, a bright, immaterial cross of light suspended in the air. The religious symbol is not an object hung on or carved into the wall; it is light itself, its position and intensity changing through the day and the seasons.

Reducing the work to allow nothing but the three — material (concrete), void (slit), and light (cross) — Ando shows that the spiritual effect of architecture can arise not from ornament but from the pure relation of these three elements. The Church of the Light is one of the purest and most cited examples of contemporary minimalist and 'phenomenological' architecture, uniting the Japanese sense of space (light, shadow, emptiness) with the modern exposed-concrete aesthetic.