It was built from a material. Completely. Thus, the pilgrimage church consecrated in May 1968 in the now Velbert-associated Bergisch timber-framed town has also become synonymous with stubbornness and brutality: concrete. Exposed concrete. However, during those years of awakening, the cement-gravel mixture symbolized the message of the time: unconditional modernity, freedom. Also, the freedom of the builder, almost redeemed from the dictates of support and load to stack, arch, and cover what the imagination of the artist, who slumbers in every good architect, could conceive.
In the case of Neviges, the building dream grew from the hands of the trained sculptor and architect Gottfried Böhm, born in 1920 in Offenbach, son of the esteemed church builder (and builder's son) Dominikus Böhm (1880–1955), who moved to Cologne with his family in 1926, where the dynasty has now produced architectural works of significance in the fourth generation, with Gottfried's three sons Peter, Paul, and Stephan.
Neviges is located in the valley and on the slope, the cathedral at mid-height. The step inside is overwhelming. Not unlike the effect of Gothic cathedrals, which reveal an interior spaciousness that conceals their external form, the Neviges cathedral also possesses two bodies: The outer one is a squat, irregularly shaped block of moderate size, broken by walls, peaks, and slopes. The inner one is a soaring space that opens up in ever new directions and to ever new aspects, felt to be twice the scale. While the external shape has bunker-like heaviness, inside the transfiguration of the same concrete into signification takes place. The walls, supports, and slanted surfaces seem immaterial.
"Maria Königin" is a configuration that is hard to grasp and nearly impossible to describe, made up of dozens of irregular polygons arranged in ever new and different ways on an equally irregular swirling floor plan. It has no ceiling and no vaults; the space closes off in a crystalline manner with several ridges at a height of 34 meters.
With light, the analogy to Gothic ends; Böhm's opus maximum shrouds itself in twilight. Although two building-high glass surfaces near the altar open the space, the glass is gray, violet, and red (showing, designed by Böhm himself, the rose he loved, the symbol of Mary) and does not penetrate the rest of the church. And above all, not into and onto the three levels of niches, balconies, pulpits, boxes, and breakthroughs, which seem to be carved from or sprouted out of concrete and give the entire right side of the space the appearance of a city in the mountains. You could take a hundred pictures of this space and still not have two the same.
Gottfried Böhm has built other folded roof constructions during his career as an architect that look like spatial images by Lyonel Feininger – St. Gertrud in Cologne (1960-66), St. Ignatius in Frankfurt/Main (1961-65), the children's village in Bergisch Gladbach (1962-68). But none is as perfected as Neviges. In the years before, he designed churches with fabric-like ceilings that billow like cloth (Neuss), with roofs that resemble tents or ski jumps (Cologne-Melaten, Essen-Katernberg), with (false) vaults, shell, folded, and flat roofs. Whatever could be done with concrete, he did. From the very beginning, however, the church he built in 1950 at the Cologne chapel "Maria in den Trümmern" is owed to Böhm's effort to oppose the willful destruction of the German post-war cities with a design will.
Böhm's churches stand in Münster, Neuss, Velbert, Essen, Oberhausen, Düsseldorf, Bochum, Gelsenkirchen, Bocholt, Aachen, and especially in Cologne. After the churches (in the 1980s it came to an end), there were secular buildings like the WDR Arcades (1991–98) and the residential complexes Chorweiler (1969–74) in Cologne. His town hall in Bensberg (Bergisch Gladbach) is famous – for this, for the main administration Züblin in Stuttgart (1981–85), and for the Neviges Cathedral, he was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1986. Bensberg is also a good example of what, despite the diversity of Böhm's buildings, they have in common: love for the surroundings. Contextual building, as architects say. It has been sufficiently demonstrated how inventive the folded roof of the pilgrimage cathedral, with its slopes and angles, reacts to the gable landscape of the Neviges old town. Similarly, the Bensberg town hall provides subtle transitions between a gentle concrete brutalism and the remnants of the medieval castle complex: the "Bürgerburg" on the ground plan of the Bergisch Castle was built from 1962-67 as Böhm's first large secular building and made the architect truly famous.
