Location: Mechernich, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Architect: Peter Zumthor
Completed: 2007
16 Photographs
When I discovered that our travel route would come near this little field chapel, I confess that I was just a little excited about the prospect of seeing it in the flesh. Probably the smallest building I have visited, and one of the most memorable. It’s a simple timeless primitive little building, squeezed into a narrow slice of buffer land between large swathes of agricultural land. Easy to miss if you’re not looking for it, but impossible to forget.
I love this building so much, I visited it twice within the space of 24 hours. We had arrived at the site late in the day one afternoon and enjoyed the brief time we’d spent there. It was clear then, that the building would feel vastly different closer to the sunrise, so we (I) made the decision to backtrack the following morning and return to the little chapel for another go.
On the two occasions we visited, we approached the structure first from the back (the wrong way?) and the following day, from the front (the right way?), and then returning back along a series of alternative routes, so we saw and watched the building from four unique angles. One of the most intriguing aspects this revealed is the way the long narrow plan means that the tower profile changes as you move around it, at first appearing flat and squat, from the sides when viewed at a distance, before becoming almost impossibly slender when viewed from the front or the back, the only way you can approach the building up close. In doing so, it plays a game with scale, reducing the relative scale of the structure, by adjusting and controlling your perception of it. It is very clever.
The way the concrete is cast, it literally feels like it is hewn from the very earth it sits on. It is the rawest concrete structure I have ever seen outside of a farmyard. The texture and layering of it looks and feels more like rammed earth, or some of the more undulating textures of the work of Tadao Ando at Chichu. It feels at once immediate, agrarian, and utilitarian, while at the same time beautifully crafted. There is a considered roughness to nearly everything, put into distinct contrast by the fineness of the finishing details. As the effect of its production on the climate is now understood, today we have a more complicated relationship with traditional concrete, yet it has always been a construction material that has fascinated me with its enormous potential. I feel like this modest little chapel is a grand example of concrete at its finest.
Inside, it has the feeling of a simple primitive place for reflection and, if you’re that way inclined, prayer. I have always loved to drop into little churches and chapels along the way wherever they pop out along the roadside, and this felt similar in that way. If it were not for the buzz of similarly inclined travelers such as myself hovering in and out and breaking the calm, it could easily be forgotten that this is a masterpiece drawing visitors from far and wide.
HWLK