The swiss archi­tect Peter Zumthor built an art museum around the wreck­age of the parish church St.Kolumba. com­mis­sioned by Car­di­nal Meis­ner (lately in the news with his com­ment of “Entartete Kunst” on Ger­hard Richter’s design for the window Koel­ner Dom) , the won com­pe­ti­tion in 1997 was finally real­ized 10 years later.The museum is an archaic castle for reli­gious art of 2000 years sycamore cul­ture as well for modern installations.

Kolumba con­sists of sev­eral peri­ods in archi­tec­ture his­tory: start­ing with the late Gothic church St.Kolumba, the chapel “Madonna in den Trümmern” ( “Madonna in ruins” ) was buillt in 1950. Inter­est­ingly enough, the archi­tect of this little chapel, Got­tfried Böhm, made now the very con­tro­ver­sial dis­cussed design for the Zen­tral­moschee Köln Cologne Mosque Project. Con­tin­u­ing 1973-1976 with the archae­o­log­i­cal exca­va­tion, final­ized by Zumthor’s new design.

Enter­ing the build­ing, I am moved by the fact, that archi­tec­ture is able to create such an unique atmos­phere of spirit.”A museum, which lives from light and which shows, how the dark­ness and bright­ness are brother and sister” (Benedikt Loderer). One extreme is the “black room”, absolute dark­ness, with the glim­mer of the relics.

Bright­ness enters the upper part of the museum with pre­cise, big open­ings to the sur­round­ing (view to the banal after-​war build­ings as well on the dome).

Zumthor cre­ated a calm place to stay with an extreme exclu­sive­ness by using pure detail and mate­ri­al­ity. He is known as a extreme con­trol freak, there is no little error in the whole build­ing (trust me, I searched for them). It is a master piece, worth its 43,5 M Euros, given that it man­ages to be an inter­na­tional reli­gious land­mark for Cologne beside the cathedral.