Ark Church, Daebudo: Itami Jun's Secret on the Mainland

Everyone knows the one in Jeju. Almost no one comes to this one.

The Ark Church on Daebudo is one of those places that exists in plain sight and still manages to stay invisible. It sits inside The Heaven Resort — a golf and leisure complex tucked onto the tidal flats of Daebudo, an island off the coast of Ansan, just over an hour south of Seoul. The name of the resort starts to feel intentional once you see what’s at its center.

A Second Ark

Itami Jun (유동룡, 1937–2011) — the Korean-Japanese architect who spent his career building for both countries while fully belonging to neither — left his most celebrated work on Jeju Island: the Water, Wind, and Stone museums at Biotopia, the Podo Hotel, and the Jeju Ark Church, completed in 2009. That church became a minor pilgrimage site for architecture visitors almost immediately. This one, on the mainland, remained largely unremarked upon.

The Daebudo Ark Church was commissioned by the resort’s owner, who wanted a chapel that carried the symbolism of Noah’s Ark — a vessel of sanctuary amid open water. Itami Jun took the brief and rooted it in the land itself. Daebudo is an island, surrounded by the West Sea’s tidal mudflats, and the building answers that geography directly: an oval body that appears to float on a shallow reflecting pool, its elliptical dark-roofed form resting as if it had come to rest here after a long voyage.

The Form

From the parking lot, framed by cherry blossoms in early spring, the building reads as something between a ship’s hull and a low hill. The approach is through granite steps rising along a grass mound, flanked by two fluted stone towers that frame a shadowed entry. A lone cross stands to one side — simple, unadorned, almost monastic. The cross and the curved body of the building exist in deliberate tension: the vertical and the horizontal, the symbol and the vessel.

The roof is the defining gesture. A deep dark overhang — circular, almost fungal in scale — extends far beyond the building’s walls, casting the facade into near-permanent shade. Beneath it, the oval walls curve away in both directions, their surface rendered in pale stone tile above and granite panel below. The effect is architectural compression followed by release: you walk under the shadow, and the building opens to a reflecting pool that mirrors the sky.

The water wraps the building on three sides. On a clear day, the pool extends the horizon — the mountains of the interior visible in the distance, the sea implied beyond. The structure appears not so much to sit on the land as to be moored to it.

Finding It

Coming here outside cherry blossom season, the space reads as deliberately austere. The grounds stay quiet even when the resort parking lot fills; most visitors to The Heaven are here for the golf course, not the church. The building is accessible to non-guests approaching on foot from the main resort road, though it functions as a working chapel for resort events.

Daebudo itself rewards a drive. The tidal flats, the salt air, and the flatness of the landscape make the resort’s hilltop position feel quietly elevated — and when the sky is clear, as it was the morning these photographs were taken, the views toward the sea are genuinely arresting.

This is the part of Itami Jun’s work that Seoul visitors tend to miss entirely, and it’s forty minutes from Incheon by car.