Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

The openness of Wiederin’s design is engaging, evoking intimacy and seclusion. The strip lighting spreads an
even light as well as marking out a simple cross.
Places of pilgrimage are often in far-flung rural locations,
where the remoteness from civilisation or proximity to nature
seem to contribute to the journeying, the arrival, and the
genius loci of the place in question. One such site, at
Locherboden in the Tyrolean Upper Inn Valley, owes its
pilgrimage status to a miracle of the Virgin Mary in 1871. The
number of Christians coming to this place for a pilgrimage
that is walked by night six times a year has reached over
2,000. The apex where pilgrims would remain for a candle-lit
service was once simply a clearing between trees and a rugged
cave in the rocks. Now, at the end of the path leading up from
the valley, a low open chapel sits at the foot of the caves,
luminescent at night, deliberate and poised in its form.
The Austrian architect Gerold Wiederin, whose design was
chosen as a result of a countrywide competition, did not seek
to glorify or enhance the natural environment of the site, but
simply to provide ‘the framework for a religious observance in
the midst of unformed nature’. Equally, the chapel does not
shy away from a strong architectural statement, borrowing
heavily from Modernist themes and incorporating a vivid
piece of glasswork as its central motif.
Wiederin also follows a traditional cross formation as a
structural element in the rectangular roof, with two
intersecting tramlines of poured concrete beams stretching
the length and breadth of the ceiling, visible both from within
the chapel and from above it. One central bar of the cross is
missing, relieving the symbol of an overobviousness (the
beams can look merely functional), so that on the underside,
where fluorescent strip lighting is set into the beams beneath
semitransparent glass, one light is omitted and light from the
coloured glasswork given priority.
Four square pillars, the floor, the furniture, the sacristy
and the ceiling are all cast in exposed concrete connecting
visually with the grey rocks and increasing the sense of
functionality and, with that, a kind of determination. The
pillars’ corners fall flush with those of the ceiling and there is
an unarguable purity in the structure, like that of a Greek
temple or a 1950s garage.
One step up raises the chapel from its grassy foundations
and defines its boundary. The altar is centred, and only the
lectern, set to one side, disrupts the symmetry of the chapel’s
other components, including the central glasswork by the
artist Helmut Federle. Out of the clarity of Wiederin’s geometry
comes an explosion of fragmented glass, falling (or rising) in a
riotous river of colour. Welded branches of iron support the
stacked lumps of glass in green, blue, red and yellow, like
factory leftovers, but none the less attractive for it. On
pilgrimage nights the glass is backlit, and is as opulent to the
distant gaze of gathered pilgrims as it is at close quarters.
With the cross set into the ceiling like an overseeing and
protecting sign, Wiederin has also incorporated symbols for
the Virgin Mary and the papal cross on the front of the
concrete altar, deeply inscribed and handled with a sense of
abstraction. The small sacristy, with doors at either side, is an
essential adjunct where priests can gather and prepare, the
baldachino effect ensuring they are at least sheltered from the
elements during worship. The chapel is thus set, not unlike a
theatre stage, for a nocturnal Mass in front of the pilgrims
and between the woods, mountains, neighbouring churches
and the aura of past miracles and saints.
Laura Moffatt is acting director of the Art and Christianity Enquiry and is
currently studying the theology of 20th-century church architecture. She is coauthor,
with Edwin Heathcote, of Contemporary Church Architecture, Wiley-
Academy, £39.99, isbn 0470031565, published in March 2007. See
www.wiley.com.
Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Gerold Wiederin, photos
Christian Kerez
Gerold Wiederin, Pilgrimage Chapel, Locherboden, Austria, 1997
Helmut Federle’s glasswork is a brilliant slice of colour and irregularity, bringing the natural forms around the chapel
into sharper focus and contrasting the otherwise organised geometry of Wiederin’s structure.
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