The Aesthetist

Katholischen Pfarrkirche Christi Auferstehung (Catholic Church of the Resurrection of Christ) – original state Melaten - Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany; 1963-70

Gottfried Böhm

«The religious building had a special place in the building boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The numerous churches and community centers built by both the Catholic and Protestant communities offered architectural scope in which neither the cost-benefit calculations of speculative building owners nor the legal guidelines for the support of social residential buildings came to bear. In these places, unaffected by the rules of this world and wishing to set the tone for a different world, there was still space for thinking in images. Rudolf Schwarz, a friend of Gottfried’s father who featured in the life of Gottfried Böhm as his temporary employer in the business of rebuilding the city of Cologne in 1950 spoke of the churches as though they were “great creations each of them with a different name which pertained to its innermost nature”. Not all church builders had such a discerning view of their work. But it is true to say that in lean times the sacral building offered a protected space which displaced ideas of profitability inherent in pragmatic architecture and where design decisions were discussed at all. Almost every year new settlement in those years displays a situation in which the standardized banalities of residential building companies jarred with the highly individual building forms of sacral architecture.» by Wolfgang Pehnt.

see map about the architect 1, 2 | images

Building of the Atomium in Brussels for the World’s Fair 1958

Study with lions