The basis of the new building is formed by the ruins of the late Romanesque church of St. Columba, at one time the center of the largest parish of medieval Cologne. In 1945, it was destroyed during an air raid almost to the ground, only the limestone statue of Our Lady in the altar of the temple remained intact, for which Gottfried Boehm later built a special chapel in 1950. At the same time, the ruins of the church were turned into a kind of memorial square. In the early 1970s, on its territory, archaeologists discovered the remains of buildings from different eras of Cologne's existence - ancient Roman, early medieval, Romanesque and Gothic.
Such an object of cultural and historical heritage is in itself unusually difficult to perceive and preserve, but when the Museum of the Cologne diocese decided to build in its place - inside and around the existing ruins - a new building to display its extensive collection of religious art from late antiquity to the present day, the situation has become many times more complicated. The decision to expand the museum was made back in 1974, but the ruins of the Church of St. Columba were chosen as its new location only in the early 1990s. In 1997, an architectural competition was held, in which the project of the outstanding Swiss architect Peter Zumthor won. The jury noted the remarkable skill with which Zumthor was able to combine fragments of 2000 years of architectural history of Cologne (from the foundations of buildings of the ancient Romans to the chapel "Madonna in the Ruins" of Boehm in 1950) into a single ensemble, which is more than just the sum of its parts.
The restoration and conservation of the architectural remains took several years, and the construction of the Columbus Museum itself began only in 2003.
The building resembles the Latin L in plan and is deployed at its right angle to the street. Its walls, lined with flat and wide light gray bricks with thick layers of a binder mortar, do not seem at all, thanks to the delicate texture of the surface, the result of a bricklayer. Remnants of the church walls are built into them at ground level, and above them are broken sections of "perforation" and large rectangular windows, contrasting with the monumental weight of the 60 cm thick wall. The church plan includes a small gravel courtyard on the site of the old parish cemetery. The visitor enters it on the way from the lobby to the main "exhibition hall" of the first floor. This "hall" is a huge room 12 m high, along which a zigzag bridge is laid over the foundations of ancient and medieval buildings found as a result of archaeological excavations. Zumthor used artificial lighting very sparingly here, so almost all the light enters in through strips of small holes in the outer walls of the building; from the inside, this technique further emphasizes the seeming disembodiment of these walls, which can be seen as an allusion to the principles of Gothic sacred architecture or a reference to the works of the mystics of that time. The octahedron of the Boehm chapel is inscribed in the same space, which, however, can be accessed from outside the museum.
At the end, a bridge leads the visitor to the premises of the former sacristy, turned into a small courtyard; there is a sculpture by Richard Serra "Drowned and Rescued".
Above the first tier, there are two more floors of exhibition halls, a total of sixteen. They are designed as free-standing blocks - "houses", between which "streets" of white terrazzo are laid; each such hall differs from others in size, method and intensity of illumination and route of inspection. The exhibits are displayed in them without observing the chronology and without any explanatory texts and labels. Thus, the curators of the museum wanted to achieve an unbiased perception of works of art by the audience.
In the project of the Cologne diocese museum, Zumthor used to unite cultural monuments from different eras - both architectural, located in situ, and included in the museum's collection - an emphasized laconic formal architectural language, softened by the architect's attention to the specifics of the material, to its tactile and visual properties; a special role there is played by lighting, which is almost insufficient for a full inspection of the exhibits, but gives their perception a special acuity. All this makes this work, at least outwardly, similar to the religious buildings of the Middle Ages, the epoch of the construction of the destroyed church of St. Columba, which gave him its name, as well as the time of the hegemony of Catholicism on the territory of Germany, which did not yet know the upheavals of the Reformation. At the same time, the use of the techniques of sacred architecture in the building of a museum - even a museum of religious art - makes one think about a deep change in the system of priorities of a modern person, not only about a shift in spiritual ideals towards a more "secular" picture of the world, but also about a certain "populist" aspect of the entire sphere of modern culture. However, it should not be forgotten that the same architecture of the medieval cathedrals of the West was designed not for a handful of the elite, but for all believers without exception; Perhaps Zumthor continues this line in the Columbus Museum, addressing each of us through the design of his building.
