”Son, grandson, husband, and father of architects, Gottfried Böhm has reason to recognize the nourishment that traditional ways and means provide in architecture, as in all the arts.” So read the citation of the jury when Böhm won the Pritzker Prize in 1986. He was the first German to win the prestigious award, and until 2015 when Frei Otto was selected for the prize, the only one. Böhm died at 101 on June 9 at his longtime home in Cologne.
Of the more than 150 buildings he designed in his seven-decades-long career, nearly half were churches—many of which replaced churches destroyed during World War II. At the Madonna of the Ruins church in Cologne, which Böhm began working on in 1949—his first project designed on his own after collaborating in his father Dominikus’s architecture office—an octagonal freestanding volume is set amid the surviving pieces of the former chapel. The structure was later incorporated into the Kolumba Art Museum (2007) by Peter Zumthor.
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