Project <strong>Bruder</strong> <strong>Klaus</strong> <strong>Field</strong> <strong>Chapel</strong> Location Mechernich-Wachendorf, Germany Architect Peter Zumthor Project Team Rainer Weitschies, Michael Hemmi, Frank Furrer, Pavlina Lucas, Rosa Goncalves. Structural Engineers Jurg Buchli, Claus Jung Photographers Walter Mair, Pietro Savorelli issue 07 <strong>Bruder</strong> <strong>Klaus</strong> <strong>Field</strong> <strong>Chapel</strong> 30 31
Project <strong>Bruder</strong> <strong>Klaus</strong> <strong>Field</strong> <strong>Chapel</strong> Location Mechernich-Wachendorf, Germany Architect Peter Zumthor Project Team Rainer Weitschies, Michael Hemmi, Frank Furrer, Pavlina Lucas, Rosa Goncalves. Structural Engineers Jurg Buchli, Claus Jung Photographers Walter Mair, Pietro Savorelli issue 07 <strong>Bruder</strong> <strong>Klaus</strong> <strong>Field</strong> <strong>Chapel</strong> 32 In September 2004 when Peter Zumthor, the Swiss architect, presented the inaugural international lecture of the Australian Architecture Association, to a packed house in the Melbourne Town Hall, he described a small project, then still in design. 33 It was for a tiny chapel on private farmland at Mechernich, a village about 50 kilometres southwest of Cologne, in southern Germany. He talked of how in 1998 he’d been approached by a farmer and his wife, Herman-Josef and Trudel Scheidtweiler, who wanted to build a shrine in one of their fi elds in honour of <strong>Bruder</strong> <strong>Klaus</strong>, a 15th century hermit. They wanted to erect the chapel, they had said, “in thanks for a good and happy life.” The audience sat spellbound as Zumthor described how the chapel was going to be built: of fi rst erecting a tepee of logs, encasing it in concrete and setting it alight from inside, to smoulder slowly until the logs were burnt away, much the same way charcoal used to be made, leaving behind a charred shell, lit only by an opening from above. From memory, he showed a beautifully rendered pencil drawing. <strong>Bruder</strong> <strong>Klaus</strong> (1417-87) was a farmer himself, but for the last 20 years of his life he lived as hermit at Flüeli-Ranft, about 70kms northeast of Lucerne, Switzerland, surviving, according to legend, on a diet of the Holy Eucharist alone. As a teenager he is said to have had visions of inhabiting a tower in the service of God; he also spoke of a vision, while still inside his mother’s womb, of seeing a star that lit up the world. In 1469, local civic authorities built him a simple monastic cell and chapel – it is still there – where he meditated and dispensed advice to the most powerful politicians of the day. He was declared a saint in 1947. It happens that <strong>Bruder</strong> <strong>Klaus</strong> is also the patron saint of Switzerland and a favorite of Zumthor’s mother. Zumthor took on the job, free apparently, as a gift to his mother. The chapel is now done, and it stands as a sentinel fi rmly rooted in the landscape on the edge of a fi eld on the Scheidtweiler farm. Since its inauguration in May it has attracted as many architectural pilgrims fl ocking to see this new work from the hand of the Swiss perfectionist as locals coming to pay their respects to the memory of a hermit monk. In its irregular fi ve-sided form, rising starkly above the surrounding landscape, there are virtually no clues to what lies within. It appears impenetrable, has no windows and it could be, for all you’d know, a modern take on the idea of a medieval lookout tower. A narrow gravel path leads from the road directly to its massive, triangular steel door; the only giveaway that this might be a place of pilgrimage: a spindly bronze cross embedded in the banded concrete surface above the doorway. ≥
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