[EDIT]: After getting a very nice answer by Kevin Buzzard I realize that my question was a little bit too vague and I try to restate it more precisely.
As the title says, I would like to understand an isomorphism of Hida from a more geometric perspective than what I normally read. What bothers me is that there are two construction of the universal (ordinary) Hida-Hecke algebra and they turn out to give isomorphic objects: fix a prime $p\geq 5$, and a tame level $N$ prime to $p$.
- Take the projective limit over the level $r$ of the Hecke algebra acting on $S_k(\Gamma_1(Np^r),\mathbb{Z}_p)$ where $k$ is any weight. By applying the usual idempotent, one gets the Hida-Hecke ordinary algebra $h_k^0(Np^\infty;\mathbb{Z}_p)$, where I adopt notations as in Hida's paper in Inventiones, 1986, "Galois representations into $\mathrm{GL}(2,\mathbb{Z}_p[[X]])$...".
- Consider now the injective limit over the weight of the spaces of cusp forms $S_k(Np;\mathbb{Z}_p)$. By taking a suitable completion of this injective limit, one sees that the projective limit (over the weight, now) of Hecke algebras acts on the above completion. Applying again the idempotent, we get the Hida-Hecke ordinary algebra $h^0(N,\mathbb{Z}_p)$.
Theorem 1.1 in the quoted paper by Hida shows that these two algebras are isomorphic (in the most compatible way one can dream of, in particular inducing the same Hecke action on spaces of cusp forms) but his proof is entirely algebraic.
My question is: is there a reasonable way to prove this isomorphism geometrically?As Kevin Buzzard suggested, several papers of Katz (and successive work by Coleman-Mazur, Buzzard himself et al.) discuss geometric interpretation of $p$-adic modular forms and $p$-adic families of modular forms. Still, I do not understand how Hida's isomorphism comparing the Hecke algebra as acting on the projective limit over the level (so ''at the top of the modular tower'') or on the inductive limit over the weight (so, ''over the first curve $X_1(Np)$'') can be given a geometric interpretation.