Ruins Upon Ruins. St. Kolumba in Cologne

No country in recent history has experienced the harsh reality of reconstruction like Germany after the Second World War. New cities emerged from the ruins to embody modern principles of dwelling, with a prevailing vision for the city that deliberately departed from traditional modes tied to political representation. It distanced itself from totalitarian rhetoric and the monumental, unequivocally rejecting any reference to a burdensome past. In this context, the city of Cologne – largely damaged during the war – underwent several episodes of architectural reconstruction that redefined the city’s image. In the shadow of the immense cathedral lies the site of the former St. Kolumba’s, one of the oldest churches in the city at the time. It was destroyed in the bombing raids of 1943 and rebuilt in different phases throughout the twentieth century by the hands of two renowned architects: the late Gottfried Böhm and Peter Zumthor. For almost sixty years, the Madonna in den Trümmern chapel stood alone among the ruins, an octagonal concrete tent built by Böhm, until Zumthor won the 1997 competition for the construction of the Diocesan Museum. This victory was followed by a tense debate during the design process. These two works are bound in a dialectical relationship representative of an attitude in architectural design that allowed a new architectural unity to be achieved from the destruction, producing an exemplary integration between the old and the new. They bridge the gap between the traces of a not-so-distant past and our contemporary life.