Bruder Klaus Field Chapel

From the road it looks like a grain silo or a lookout that somebody forgot to finish: a blunt, windowless block of pale concrete standing alone in a field above the village of Wachendorf, on the northern edge of the Eifel. It is in fact one of the most talked-about small buildings of the early twenty-first century, a private chapel designed by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor and dedicated to Niklaus von Flüe, the fifteenth-century Swiss hermit known as Brother Klaus. The patrons were a local farming couple, Hermann-Josef and Trudel Scheidtweiler, who wanted to give thanks for a good life by building a chapel on their own land. Hermann-Josef had spent years in the Catholic rural movement, whose patron is Brother Klaus, and the couple approached Zumthor while he was building the Kolumba art museum in Cologne. Planning began in 2001, construction ran from 2005 to 2007, and the chapel was blessed in May 2007.

The way it was made is the key to what you see. First a tent-like frame of 112 spruce trunks, felled in a nearby wood, was raised on the site. Around it, volunteers and craftsmen rammed concrete by hand in half-metre layers, day after day for 24 working days, until the walls reached twelve metres. In autumn 2006 a slow, smouldering fire was kept going inside for three weeks; it charred the timber and loosened it from the concrete, and the trunks were then pulled out. What remained is a hollow cast of the wooden tent, with the grain, knots and soot of every log printed into black walls that close in towards a ragged opening in the roof. Rain and daylight fall straight through that hole onto a floor of tin and lead, melted and spread on the spot, which collects the water in a shallow dip.

Inside there is almost nothing, and that is the point. There is no altar, no electricity and no plumbing; only a bench of limewood, a steel stand for candles, a small cast brass wheel on the wall recalling the meditation image Brother Klaus kept in his hermitage, and a bronze half-figure of the saint by the Swiss sculptor Hans Josephsohn. The little holes left by the formwork ties have been plugged with about 350 hand-blown glass stoppers, so that on a bright day the dark walls are pricked with points of light like a night sky. The room is too tight for a congregation and was never meant for one: it is a place to sit alone for a few minutes. Outside, the five-sided tower changes with the weather and the season of the surrounding crops, and the walk up to it through open farmland is part of the experience.

The chapel was handed to a foundation set up to maintain it, and any surplus goes to rural development and support for disabled children in India.

Getting there

The chapel stands in fields above Wachendorf, part of the town of Mechernich, about 5 km from Mechernich itself. The nearest airport is Cologne Bonn Airport (CGN), about 42 km away. The chapel can only be reached on foot: a gently rising farm track of about 1.3 km leads up from the signposted visitor car park on Iversheimer Straße at the edge of Wachendorf, a walk of 15 to 20 minutes. A parking space closer to the chapel, on Rißdorfer Weg, is reserved for visitors with a disability permit. The nearest railway stations are Satzvey (about 3.7 km), Mechernich (about 10 km) and Euskirchen (about 11 km).