For Gottfried Boehm, architecture is a family affair. His father Dominicus was an outstanding architect, specialist in religious buildings, his grandfather owned a construction company. Gottfried's wife Elisabeth Haggenmüller was an architect, a companion of her husband; they met while studying in Munich. Their three sons followed in the footsteps of their parents (the fourth became an artist).
At the same time, Gottfried Boehm wanted to become a sculptor, and this intention was reflected in his most striking structures, concrete buildings of the 1960s - 1970s, including his masterpiece - the pilgrimage church of Our Lady in Neviges, conceived as a giant cover for believers.
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zooming 1/5 Church of Our Lady in Neviges. 1968 Photo: SEIER + SEIER via flickr.com. Attribution 2.0 Generic License (CC BY 2.0)
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zooming 2/5 Church of Our Lady in Neviges. 1968 Photo: SEIER + SEIER via flickr.com. Attribution 2.0 Generic License (CC BY 2.0)
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zooming 3/5 Church of Our Lady in Neviges. 1968 Photo: Farbhörer via Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License
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zooming 4/5 Church of Our Lady in Neviges. 1968 Photo: SEIER + SEIER via flickr.com. Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License (CC BY-NC 2.0)
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zooming 5/5 Church of Our Lady in Neviges. 1968 Photo: SEIER + SEIER via flickr.com. Attribution 2.0 Generic License (CC BY 2.0)
His first independent work was the Madonna in Ruins chapel in Cologne, where Dominicus had transferred the bureau, and where Gottfried still lives. The chapel sheltered the statue of Our Lady of the Church of St. Columba, which was miraculously unharmed during the bombing and fire (it is her ruins that are meant in the name). Now this building of the 27-year-old Boehm is completely built up by Peter Zumthor, who made on this place the Columbus Museum. This fact never ceases to upset Gottfried Boehm: his chapel, which expressed hope for a possible post-war redemption and revival, has now disappeared from the urban landscape.
Gottfried Boehm received the Pritzker Prize in 1986 and remained the only German architect on the list of laureates until 2015, when the award was awarded to Fry Otto. In 2015, a film about Boehm and his family was widely released in Germany - a rare case for an architectural documentary.
Now Boehm is mainly engaged in consulting architects engaged in the restoration and reconstruction of his churches and other structures (we wrote about one such project), and also cooperates with his sons. The eldest, Stefan, is the co-author of almost all of his father's later buildings, Peter is known for his spectacular Egyptian Museum in Munich, and Paul is known for the Cologne Central Mosque, the largest in Germany.
In honor of the anniversary of Gottfried Boehm, the Böhm100 festival will be held in Cologne during the year, and the main architectural museum of Germany, in Frankfurt am Main, will tell about the very pilgrimage church in Neviges, commissioned by the Franciscans to Boehm and which has become the second largest in the Cologne archbishopric - after Cologne cathedral.
