The Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt is currently showing an exhibition dedicated to the great German church builder Gottfried B?hm, in celebration of his one-hundredth birthday. It documents Bohrn's pilgrimage church in Neviges and affords the opportunity to take a look at his oeuvre and its context. Otto Banning, Rudolf Schwarz, and Dominikus B?hm - they formed the highly influential triad of the most progressive modern church builders in Germany's largely Catholic Rhine-land of the 1920s. In its ascetic purism of broad white surfaces, the Corpus Christi Church by Rudolf Schwarz, built 1928-30 in Aachen, is a key work of the New Architecture. Bartning's Church of the Resurrection, built 1929-30 in the steel town of Essen, expressively rises up in tiers to a considerable height above a circular plan. And St Engel-bert's Church in Cologne by Gottfried Bohrn's father, Dominikus, built 1930-32 as an unconventional star-shaped cluster of parabolic vaults, is also an esteemed pioneer of a new ecclesiastical architecture oriented towards community and spirituality. Traditional basilica types with a nave and hierarchical separation of the areas for clergy and congregation were overcome back then by the European liturgical movement - long before the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, which finally gave new direction to church architecture worldwide. The B?hm family's continuity in the business of building had already begun with Dominikus's father, Alois B?hm, who was a master builder in the Swabian town of Jettin-gen. After the devastating destruction of Cologne in the Second World War, Dominikus led the rebuilding of eight churches there. His son Gottfried - who, after being wounded while serving in the military, had completed his architectural studies in Munich shortly before the war's end - worked in his studio. In 1950 Gottfried B?hm worked briefly for Rudolf Schwarz, and in this way he also established continuity with pre-war modernism. During his trip to the USA in 1951, he also met other heroes of modernism in the persons of Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. When his father Dominikus died in 1955, Gottfried took over the Cologne architectural firm with which he achieved his great successes. His most famous buildings include the extension to the Godesburg castle in Bonn (in the secular realm) as well as more than 70(!) completed sacral buildings, including the multifaceted concrete church at Neviges and the Cologne Central Mosque, built 2006-18. From the reconstruction of medieval and fin-de-siecle churches, the wide range of his idioms spans past hall types, tent-like buildings and baldachins to elementary geometric combinations of rectangular and cylindrical forms and even pyramids (Saint Cross Church in Jingliao, Taiwan). For his life's work, Gottfried B?hm was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1986 as the first German architect to be so honoured. Boehm's studio has been run since 2006 by sons Stephan, Peter, and Paul B?hm, who meanwhile head their own firms. Peter B?hm, for example, built the beautiful Philosophikum in Münster in 2017 (architektur.aktuell 7-8/2018). Thus further continuity is assured.
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