Architektur

The Benedictine abbey in Königsmünster dominates the city like a stronghold. The monastery was founded in 1928. The church, a well-fortified brick monument, was built by Cologne architect Hans Schilling in 1960. Peter Kulka took over his office in 1979 and added a residential building for novices, the refectory and a chapel to the ensemble in the eighties. A complex was created in the contemporary post-modernist spirit featuring staunch buildings linked by glass corridors, a series of protecting, contemplative rooms and bright, open passages, symbolising the daily routine of monastic life.

Opening to the outside world

The Rule of St. Benedict, which dates back to the sixth century, makes a strict division of the day into times for working and reading. Benedictine friars extended it a long time ago to include other tasks. They have opened themselves up to the outside world, do youth work, and run a grammar school and “Oasis”, a youth training centre. And they have an increasing number of guests wishing to take spiritual time out from the hustle and bustle of their everyday lives. These are people seeking peace and contemplation, wishing to find themselves and God. Since it is only possible in a few cases to accommodate temporary monks in the 60-strong Benedictine cloister, they decided to have a building purpose-built. They called it the “Haus der Stille“ (House of Silence), and it is open to men and women. Once again, they asked Peter Kulka’s architecture office to make another addition to their monastery complex.

Atmosphere of reflection

The architect’s work had meanwhile developed, returning to the origins of the classical modern period and to abstraction. Built in 2001, The Haus der Stille is the culmination of this development. The aim of designing rooms with nothing more than simple cubes and light corresponded ideally to the task of creating an ascetic, reflective atmosphere of silence and concentration.

Even in the approach to the hillside monastery, the building signals seclusion. It consists of two austere, clear-cut concrete cubes pushed into the slope. One is narrower and the other wider, and there is a gap between them. The gap arouses one’s curiosity. It opens up slightly - this is the entrance to the building. One realises that the glass gap completely divides the two parts of the building, that it opens up a view down into the valley, and that there are glass bridges cutting through it on three storeys. These connecting bridges link the rooms in the wider cube with the staircases in the narrow cube, which serve the circulation of the building.

A small-scale monastery

There are twenty cells at the entrance level and on the first floor, furnished simply and ascetically with necessities in light birch: a bed, a wardrobe, a table, a chair and a crucifix. The slope basement below houses the refectory, the office and two meeting rooms. The peripheral corridor resembles a small cloister. The two-storey meeting room in the basement provides space for courses and meditation. Kulka has created a miniature monastery, giving “temporary monks“ a place of contemplation with its own unique sense impressions. The monastery includes the small chapel at the head end of the “pathway house“, which is narrow, very high, and unornamented apart from the regular holes in the concrete formwork and the wall-size crucifix. With light flooding in indirectly from above, it is the building’s most impressive room, very sombre and with an inescapable calm.

Conscious stagings of movement

The routes taken several times each day by the monks from their cells to the chapel, assembly room and refectory are conscious stagings of movement from one calm place to another through light and shade.

In its stringency and abstraction, Kulka’s ascetic architecture of concrete and light is reminiscent of the works of Japanese architect Tadao Ando. While Ando also prescribes his monastically meditative architecture without distinction for residents of one-family houses, museum visitors and conference delegates, the simplicity detached from the outside world and the rooms’ meditative atmosphere find their true purpose in Kulka’s monastery construction. Few buildings with such spiritual intensity and overwhelming peace have been built since the early Romanesque period. After a fortnight of contemplation, every temporary friar has difficulty returning to the hectic everyday world, with its excess of mobile telephones, computers and television.