It almost sounds like a legend: A farmer wants to build a chapel and comes across words of praise for a world-famous architect in a newspaper, whom he, in short, asks for help in a handwritten letter. Out of sympathy, the architect agrees to the project, foregoes most of his fee, and designs a sublime work of sacred architecture in the middle of the countryside. The result: the Brother Claus Chapel in Mechernich.

From a distance, the twelve-meter-high concrete tower on a five-sided foundation on gently undulating spelt fields appears light, severe, and bold. An unusual but friendly foreign body stands there in the tranquil landscape. Entering the triangular portal, the impression changes radically. The almost sepulchral, teardrop-shaped devotional space of a blackened concrete skeleton structure is sparsely furnished: a bench, a stele with a figure of Saint Nicholas, and at head height, a wheel with six spikes as his symbol. The eye is drawn upwards: The building is open to the sky. Sunlight falls into the room, as well as rain, which collects on the leaden floor.

The Swiss Pritzker Prize laureate Peter Zumthor was working on his plans for the Diocesan Museum Kolumba in Cologne, when he received the letter of Hermann-Josef Scheidtweiler from the Voreifel, who was planning a chapel in honor of the Holy Brother Claus. The farmer saw in him a patron for Catholic rural youth; the architect knew him above all as the Swiss Nicholas of Flüe whom his mother venerated. A fortunate combination that made the unlikely possible. After a long period of planning, the attraction for believers and architectural experts from all around the world was built in Mechernich between 2005 and 2007.

The unusual chapel was constructed in an unusual process. First the architect had more than one hundred spruce-tree stems erected in the shape of a teepee. Then volunteers layered courses of tamped concrete around the tree stems, forming the exterior skin of the monolith. A three-week charcoal fire separated the tree stems from the concrete, which were then pulled out of the opening at the top with a crane. Finally, the raw concrete walls were blackened with a second fire.

The confined space and darkness, the rough materiality, the reduction, but also the opening to the sky sensually address the theme of asceticism and the seclusion in praise of God lived by the hermit Brother Claus. Thus the Brother Claus Chapel is an artistic expression of the traditional piety in the Eifel.