chapel

Bruder Klaus Feldkapelle /  by hugo keene

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

Kings College Chapel /  by hugo keene

Location: Cambridge, England
Master Masons: Reginald Ely, John Wolrich, Simon Clerk, John Wastell
Completed: 1515

11 Photographs

For a bloke from a small town out the back of Australia, spending a decade living in Cambridge, where the buildings are almost a thousand years old, felt at times like a fairy tale. I will always remember cycling recklessly along the narrow Cambridge streets in the wintertime, the slippery cobbles glistening in the lamplight, passing wooden portals in stone walls to strange worlds beyond, sometimes open, usually not. Beyond each of these gateways, I soon learned that all sorts of wonders lay waiting to be discovered, and of these that I know, the ‘little chapel’ at Kings College is my most beloved. The most extraordinary building in Cambridge and one of my favourite buildings in the world.

I do not remember exactly the first time I entered, I think it was the first time I visited Cambridge, but I found myself returning time and time again over the years. Every chance I had to take someone new, I would. It used to be free to visit if you were a resident of Cambridge and I loved to wander in on occasion and sit quietly while the tourists milled about. The experience of being a resident in a tourist town can be frustrating, but equally one is able to visit something like this over and over again when its beauty is enough to draw people from all corners of the globe to just see it once.

I cannot effuse enough about the chapel itself, so I will not even try but instead recollect the first time I met my good friend and collaborator, Peter Salter. We discussed two things that stand out amongst many, fly fishing and fan vaults. Peter had recently written an article about fan vaults, the miraculous stone vaulting system ingeniously employed in at Kings College to extraordinary effect, and we discussed the similarities between the two, the nature of tension, compression, and suspension. I was already in love with the chapel and I recall pondering the two interlinked discussions. I did learn to fly fish rather badly but like with a lot of what I learned from Peter, it will take me another decade or so to figure out what it really meant.

I contemplated not including this building, not because it’s more than 400 years older than nearly every other building I love, nor because my perspective may be clouding my favour, but because of just how little justice photographs can possibly do to a place like this. The grandeur of the exquisite stone ceiling is impossible to convey, much less the light from the stained glass coming in from all sides. I cannot do it justice, no matter how my photographs might try.

HWLK