A Japanese property developer has rebuilt a 100-year-old English country church at 3/4 scale on the 22nd floor of a tower in central Osaka. The developer hopes to capitalise on the Japanese vogue for being married in traditional English churches, offering a low-cost, local alternative to flying to England.
English church rebuilt in Japan
On the same floors as the reproduced church are photographic studios and restaurants, while a hotel and honeymoon suites are above.The Grade-I listed church is one of the few with a thatched roof in England.
Reverend Will Pridie said the developers had visited the church and took laser measurements to enable the new one to be built...
"We are a very tiny village and congregation. I think everyone is just astonished that anyone would do such a thing - especially when you consider it is 21 floors up."
(Image: BBC)
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Oh! It was measured with lasers!
ARRRRRGHHHH the nytimes had an article maybe 5 years back about buildings inside of buildings, and I can't find it. Is there another happy mutant who remembers this?
One thousand years ago,
Superstition and the sword ruled.
It was a time of darkness.
It was a world of fear.
It was the age of Gargoyles.
Stone by day, warriors by night,
We were betrayed by the humans we had sworn to protect,
Frozen in stone by a magic spell for a thousand years.
Now, here in Manhattan, the spell is broken, and we live again!
We are defenders of the night!
We are Gargoyles!"
Ok, I'm just gonna say it:
The Japanese, they crazy motherfuckers!
Well anyway I've always loved finding buildings inside buildings. Two of my favorites are the coop shot tower in melbourne and the Hayden planetarium in NYC. The Luxor in Vegas is another good example.
Can anyone else think of notable buildings inside buildings?
Reminds me of the final stage in Sim Tower...Where you get to build the Sky Cathedral...
@5 Cheyenne Mountain: a cluster of steel buildings on springs inside a hollow mountain.
Kaiza beat me to it. This is no wedding chapel, it's an elaborate Xanatos gambit...
The dome at the south pole station has other buildings inside it.
Yes! I shake you by the hand.
how quaint
Does this remind anyone else of the opening plot to the Gargoyles cartoon show?
We had a neat buildings-within-a-building setup for a little while here in Columbus, OH; a home products company had several complete homes built inside a warehouse downtown. Unfortunately, (1) it was to help sell high end finishes for suburban mini-mansions, and (2) the developer went bankrupt and didn't pay a lot of their contractors. So it never really got off the ground. Sure looked neat, though, to see these big suburban houses inside the huge windows of a brick and steel warehouse building.
The outer building itself was really cool, and fortunately it was saved and they've put offices in it now.
There's the 19th century Rideau Chapel rebuilt inside the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
http://www.gallery.ca/images/mediacenter/chapel_hires.jpg
A very interesting place to stumble into if you didn't know it was there.
On the plus side with a thachet roof inside it should never need replacing!
I think it'd be cool to be married somewhere like this (not neccessarily in Japan, but with something unique). If this caught on I think it might loose it's appeal.
Yo, dawg! We heard you like churches. So we put a church inside your church, so you can go to church when you are in church.
church. ;p
pedant
"Wee" is a Scottish English terms for "small." Describing this as a "wee English church" is a bit like calling a Scottish one a "pukka Scots kirk"
/pedant
This isn't the first church to be reconstructed within a building in Osaka for the purpose of hosting weddings. The Chapel Goedele is located on the 8th floor of the Hotel Monterey Osaka and it's a pretty stunning recreation (I assume it's a recreation) of a church, though I have no idea from where. You can see a photograph of the church, inside a kind of open-air recess carved into the building, here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/andyboyh/3795156955/
The coolest part about Chapel Goedele, however, is that the backside of the building actually hangs out over the air, though you only realize this by looking at the building from outside, not while you're inside the chapel itself:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/xygen/223172143/
The reason I know so much about this spot is that I actually performed a wedding there once, which was an interesting experience. At the risk committing the cardinal sin of blog-entry self-advertisement:
http://troutfactory.wordpress.com/2005/08/22/ultimate-religious-cosplay/
Of course there's always the parthenon. I would argue that what the parthenon means changes totally when you put the building inside a bigger building. If the Brits put the parthenon in Hyde Park it'd mean less. There's a wonderful meta-quality to the thing, cultures enveloping each other.
That sounds awesome! Was there grass? I imagine it with astroturf.
Reminds me of the chapel/mah jong club building on top of the school building in the Saki anime - http://www.crunchyroll.com/library/Saki