To the death of Gottfried Böhm

Everyone should be able to relate to the legacy of their ancestors when forming their own personality. Gottfried Böhm came from a family where faith and the architectural craft were passed down through many generations. In an environment of strong personalities, one can gain a lot of experience, but there is also the risk of not stepping out of their shadow. In Gottfried's case, it was his father Dominikus, who was not only the author of dozens of churches but also a professor of sacred art at the university in Cologne. Gottfried Böhm was deeply affected by his experiences during World War II, during which he was wounded on the Russian front. His war injury and subsequent discharge from military duties allowed him to begin studying sculpture and architecture at the Technical University of Munich under Hans Döllgast. After school, he led an architectural office with his father until his death, participating in the reconstruction and construction of eight churches. He spent more than sixty years in a happy marriage with Elisabeth Böhm (née Haggenmüller), and together they raised four sons, three of whom became prominent architects. During the 1960s to the 1980s, he shared his experiences as a professor of urban planning and architectural design with students at the RWTH Aachen University. Despite his long teaching career, he was not a proponent of lengthy speeches or theoretical writings. More than sixty realized churches can convey all that is essential, even though their author is no longer with us. Gottfried Böhm was among the last witnesses who actively helped restore the faces of cities in Germany devastated by war. Böhm was very different from his contemporaries. He did not choose the path of modernists, who focused primarily on functional aspects, nor postmodernists, who viewed buildings as distinct objects. Böhm's houses are small towns. With a timeless aesthetic, he created his own universes. His buildings always went deeper and appealed to the inner feelings of visitors, inviting them to have a haptic experience of archaic spaces built from rough materials. When, at the beginning of the 1960s, Böhm was working on the project for the Marian Church in Neviges, he presented his vision to the almost blind Cardinal Joseph Frings through a model. Through the model, the cardinal (and later other believers) could better understand what words fail to express.

On the occasion of Böhm's 100th birthday, the German Architecture Museum (DAM) in Frankfurt am Main organized a comprehensive retrospective exhibition in 2020, accompanied by a rich program commemorating this first German holder of the Pritzker Prize from 1986.